THE HISTORY AND PRESENT POSITION OF WHITE 
ANT TREATMENT IN MALAYA. 
By P. B. Richards," a.r.c.sc. 
(Acting Government Entomologist, F.M.S .) 
N considering wliat subject to select, of interest to both the 
v ~' / rubber and coconut sections of the planting community, I 
thought it might not be unprofitable to traverse the history of the 
treatment of the major pest of plantation cultivation in Malaya, 
namely Termes gestroi, 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 
extract some lesson applicable to the present. 
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 considerable advances towards the complete control of 
Termes gestroi have been made, I venture to think I need make 
no apology for drawing* upon my own experience. 
The first printed record of white ants damaging crops is in an 
article by Ridley in the Agricultural Bulletin of the Malay Peninsula 
No. 4, January, 1895. He wrote : ‘‘One constantly hears of coffee and 
other trees being destroyed by termites, and the informants seem to 
think that the insects absolutely eat the roots 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 termites “ usually so induced 
by a dead bough ” throw* up galleries along the trunk and attack the 
bark, and so “ by letting the wood suffer from exposure, injure or 
kill the tree.” “ But this,” he wrote, “ is rare and almost invariably 
occurs in trees dying from other causes.” A young clove tree, the 
death of which was at first ascribed to termites because galleries 
were thrown up around the base of the tree under which the insects 
had eaten a*way all the bark, was subsequently found to have been 
attacked by a fungus. “ As soon as the fungus had practically killed 
it the termites threw up their galleries and began to destroy the 
dead part 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 
