The Termites Are Winning

U.S. scientists last week admitted that one war is being lost-this year the 58 U.S. varieties of termites, frail, pale, ¼-inch-long insects, will destroy some $50,000,000 worth of property (by boring into and eating the wooden framework of buildings), and almost nothing can stop them.

This equals the annual damage done by rats, mice or weevils, and exceeds that of tornadoes, earthquakes or arsonists.

It is also another way of saying that the power of the termite attack is greater than the power of the human defense. No important new anti-termite measures (present cost: some $7,000,000 a year) can be devised until man learns more about his insect enemy. Meanwhile the ingenious termites are also learning how to circumvent man.

The greatest single event in termite history was the invention of central heating. Better-heated houses now permit these sensitive insects to extend their activities for the first time into regions where temperatures under 50° would otherwise kill them. In general, human civilization has been a blessing to termites. In large areas of the South and West, termites have built themselves into the underpinning of the American home.

Only in the last 20 years have scientists really become termite-conscious. Termites were almost unknown in 1781, when the Royal Society decided that Naturalist Smeathman was heat-crazy when he reported that tropical termites build nests ten to 35 ft. high (sometimes miscalled ant-hills), the largest structures built by any animal except man. In the U.S. the work of termites was long mistaken for that of fungi and dry-rot which usually follow their riddlings.

Most U.S. termites eat deadwood. They have the almost unique power of digesting cellulose. Hence, unlike most animals, they have little natural competition to check their increase. Most insects depend upon a seasonal food supply, and their life cycles allow them only brief intervals to feed and breed. Termites almost never stop eating.

They live in and on wood. They build and bore for themselves airtight galleries which shut out light, diseases, most enemies. These galleries also keep their colonies humid and draftless, so that the soft-bodied insects do not dry up. This sheltered existence makes termites hard to fight. When soil-nesting termites travel to find wood, they construct long covered runways, which may reach even to the second floor of a house.

Mighty Gut. A termite digests cellulose with the help of the swarms of protozoa (one-celled animals) which teem in its guts. Since termites reduce cellulose (the toughest part of plants) to humus and provide food for new plants, their destruction of wood is really a vital part of the vegetative cycle of growth and decay.

Its unusual eating habits also keep the termite safe from poisoned bait (used against ants, grasshoppers, etc.), contact poisons (used against orchard pests, etc.), poisoning of breeding grounds (used against mosquitoes), dusting (used against the boll weevil), introduction of natural enemies (used against the Japanese beetle and boll weevil) and other routine methods of fighting insects.