75 



THE HISTORY AND PRESENT POSITION OP WHITE 

 ANT TREATMENT IN MALAYA. 



By p. B. Eichabds, a.b.c.sc. 

 (^Acting Government Entomologist, F.M.S.) 



{ ^N considering what subject to select, of interest to both the 

 rubber and coconut sections of the planting community, I 

 thought it might not be unprofitable to ti"avei*se the history of the 

 treatment of the major pest of plantation cultivation in Malaya, 

 namely Termes ge^troi, to endeavour to trace the development of 

 knowledge of the pest and of efforts made to combat it, to see, if 

 possible, where the earlier workers went wrong, and perhaps to 

 exti-act some lesson applicable to the pi*esent. 



It is probable that there are some here of long experience of 

 Malaya, and of long memory, who would be better able to discuss the 

 historical side than I. For the earlier material I have to depend 

 largely upon the Agricultural Bulletin of the Straits and Federated 

 Malay States edited by Ridley. Of the last three years, during 

 which consideiuble advances towards the complete contixtl of 

 Termes gestroi have been made, I ventui^e to think I need make 

 no apology for drawing upon my own experience. 



The first printed recoi"d of whit« ants damaging crops is in an 

 article by Ridley in the Agricultural Bulletin of the Malay Peninsula 

 No. 4, January, 1895. He wrot^e : "One constantly hears of coffee and 

 other ti-ees being destroyed by termites, and the informants seem to 

 think that the insects absolutely eat the I'oots and base of the stem of 

 the living tree, and so destroy it. I have great doubts of this." 

 Ridley's doubts were based upon several observations. He instanced 

 that on opening termite nests, by which he presumably meant 

 mounds or nests in the soil, undamaged roots of plants might be found 

 traversing the nest. He described how tei'mites '" usually so induced 

 by a dead bough " throw up galleries along the trunk and attack the 

 bark, and so " by letting the wood suffer fi"om exposm-e, injure or 

 kill the tree." " But this," he wrote, " is rare and almost invariably 

 occurs in trees dying iroxn other causes." A young clove tree, the 

 death of which was at firet ascribed to termites because galleries 

 were thi*own up aix)und the base of the tree under which the insects 

 had eaten away all the bark, was subsequently found to have been 

 attacked by a fungus. " As soon as the fungus had pi-actically killed 

 it the termites threw up their galleries and began to destroy the 

 dead pai-t of the tree." Similarly with two young Araucarias, the 

 primary cause of death being starvation through root competition, 

 with a contributing mechanical cause in the compact clay masses of 



