24 Indian Insect Pests, [Vol. L 



• ^ 



In 1880 Dr. Riley reported ^ on the insect as injurious in the United 



States. 



In 1885 Mr. H. Ling Roth described^ the insect as occasionally 

 very destructive to sugarcane in Queensland, Australia. 



The Agricultural Officer of Burdwan and Seebpore writes ^ — 



" The sugarcane planting season extends from the beginning of Feb- 

 Nature of the injury ruary to the end of May. If there be no rains * in 

 in India. April or May, and if the cane fields are not fre- 



quently irrigated, which, from the scarcity of water at this time, is hardly 

 possible, the pest makes its appearance. The pest first shows itself by the 

 drying of the middle stalk of the plant, and is hence called by the ryots 

 the Majera (a Bengalee term meaning relating to the middle) ; on pull« 

 ing, the stalk now easily comes out, and its lower end is found to have 

 become a rotten mass. Very soon the whole plant dies away, and from 

 the root stock a number of smaller plants make their appearance to be in 

 their turn attacked by the worm. If the rains hold off a long time, or if 

 the fields are not thoroughly irrigated, three or four generations of plants 

 are in this way attacked and destroyed. At last, when the rains set in, 

 the fields become free from the insect, and a number of sickly-looking 

 cane plants shoot out, but these make very little progress and never 

 attain the proper size of the cane plant. If only one generation of 

 plants is lost, and if this happens at an early stage of the growth of the 

 plant, the damage done is not much.^^ 



The life history of the insect has not yet been fully studied in India, but 



what has been observed agrees so closely with the 



Life history. x x- j i.i- j- 



^ observations made on the correspondmg sugarcane 



pests of other parts of the world, that we may safely infer the rest, and 



thefollowingaccountthereforeis taken from Dr. Riley's paper ^ on the pest 



in America, where, however, the insect is likely to take rather longer to 



pass through the various stages of its existence than in the warm climate 



of India. 



The parent moth lays her eggs upon the leaves of the young cane 



near the axils, and the young borer, hatching in the course of a few days, 



penetrates the stalk at or near the joint, and commences to tunnel through 



the soft pith. The eggs are flat and circular, one twenty-fifth of an inch 



in diameter, *and are white when first deposited, turning yellow as they 



' Riley, 1. c. 



"^ See his * Animal Parasites of the Sugarcane/ • 



^ In a letter dated Calcutta 4th July, which has been forwarded by the Director of 

 Land Records and Agriculture, Bengal. 



* It is noticeable that while considerable injury by the pest is almost universally 

 supposed to take place only when moisture is deficient, Ling Roth, in his account of 

 the pest in Australia notices particularly that the pest occurs in *' wet springs." (See his 

 * Animal Parasites of the Sugarcane ') 



^ Report, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Entomology, 1880, p. 240. 



