ITALY: Hero of Istria

A U. S. minnow was last week the hero of Istria.

The Peninsula of Istria is on the east shore of the Adriatic. Istrians were Austrians from 1813 until 1919 and speak mostly Slavonic. Many are Croats and Slovenes.

They became Italians after the War when victorious Italy claimed Istria at the Peace Conference to help "make the Adriatic an Italian lake." Italy cared little about the grapes, cattle and lumber that grew on Istria's terraced plateau; Italy wanted a naval base. But when the Italian Government took a closer look at its new citizens it found that nine out of ten of them had symptoms of malaria. The plateau was full of semi-stagnant ponds where mosquitoes bred and rose in clouds.

In 1926 the Government set the minnow against the mosquitoes. It was the silver-brown "mosquito fish" or gambusia, found only in North & South Carolina ponds. The male is less than an inch long. The female is twice his size and gives birth to live fish. Surface-feeders, they gladly gobble all the mosquito "wigglers" they can hold. Italy bought 200,000 of them every year from U. S. fish dealers and dumped them into the Istrian ponds. They gobbled their weight in "wigglers." Fortnight ago the Italo-German Institute of Marine Biology announced that the gambusia had gobbled malaria clean out of Istria.