One Thing I Can Still Remember From Early Westerns,

was tumbleweed rolling through deserted towns,

one or two balls of it gave the flavor of a deserted town to any 1950s Wild West movie or serial, but it can some time be a pest when just way too many of them invade a town, so U.S. Agricultural Research Service scientists have applied to release exotic Eurasian fungi to kill invasive tumbleweeds in the American West, 


Dana Berner wants to start an epidemic among tumbleweeds. Berner is a pathologist with the U.S. Agricultural Research Service who studies the diseases that afflict plants, one of his projects has been a search for something that's able to infect and kill the iconic, spiny, rolling weed of the American West, after about a decade of research—plus more work, done by predecessors—he thinks he's got an answer, two fungi species that hail from the Eurasian steppes to which tumbleweed is native, He and his colleagues have submitted applications to release these exotic fungi on willing U.S. farmers' lands, now they're just waiting for an answer,

for a little more information of the program have a look here, the good news is that the Russian thistle, (Salsolatragus) that is known as tumbleweed and it's close relatives should be the only plant group that is affected by the fungus, one helpful fact is that plant diseases tend to infect closely related species and there are no plants native to the U.S. that share tumbleweeds' genus, Salsola, a trial of the fungus was tried in both Russia and Greece, with encouraging results, so who knows, if it goes according to plan in the future film directors will have to make tumble weed models to take part in the movies.