French Quarter Feeding Frenzy Anita Bartholomew

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Author's note: This pre-Katrina tale of New Orleans, although it deals with a different assault on the city, reminds me of what that place once was. So, although termites are far from New Orleans greatest challenge today, I've kept it on my site.

French Quarter Feeding Frenzy

Something utterly alien hides deep within the French Quarter of New Orleans. And it has so unnerved the locals that, rather like the vampires reputed to haunt these streets, they zig-zag to avoid streetlamps, lest the menace drawn by the lights follows them home.

In a smooth-as-aged-Bourbon drawl, Bubby Weber, the weathered maintenance manager at the Cabildo Museum, tells of an incident at a formal party in the museum courtyard. "There were 'bout 500 people at the function," he begins. Then, he says, a shadow fell over the courtyard. Satin and velvet-garbed women shrieked. Grown men dropped cocktails mid-sip, tripping over one another trying to escape.

And that's how they say it is here every swarming season (typically from April through June). Formosan termites, in their winged reproductive stage, rain on the city. The bug-cloud is so thick, it dims the street lights. Blind, sex-crazed wood-chomping monsters dive-bomb into low-cut necklines, drown themselves in Bourbon Street revelers' beer bottles, and fall by bucketfuls onto passing cars.

But I've arrived in September; the swarmers have shed their wings, mated, and hidden underground. Although no longer hovering above, the insects are relentlessly chewing below, reducing beams, studs, support posts, and joists of centuries-old historic buildings to so many piles of toothpicks.

On a park bench across from the Cabildo Museum, outside Jackson Square, a burly trombonist in t-shirt and baseball cap blares a boisterous "Hello Dolly." Sidewalk artists sketch pastel portraits of tourists. A billboard advertises readings from "The Voodoo Queen of New Orleans." Other fortune-tellers line the perimeter in front of the park's wrought-iron fence. They proffer spells to attract love and spells to remove curses. No one seems to have a spell to get rid of the city's own buggy curse.

I feel a certain comradeship with New Orleans. A few months after I bought my dream house I learned it had been, for many years, infested by a more docile, domestic breed of subterranean termites. I’ve since had the house treated and repaired the damage— about $35,000 worth — hidden inside walls, floors, and ceilings.

From what I’ve heard, Formosans make the indigenous bugs that chowed down on my home look like amateurs. I'm here in to find out if these super-termites are as bad as they say. My guide, Gregg Henderson, is an entomologist (a scientist who studies insects) from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Outfitted in Australian outback hat, shorts, Hawaiian shirt, and hiking boots, this lanky professor hunts Formosans.

Formosans are as bad as they say, he tells me. Maybe worse.

"They're eating everything in sight," Henderson says. "And the only thing that we see that will cause their demise, ultimately, is a lack of food."

(Gulp.)

Although that food is wood and wood-products, scientists like Henderson have documented Formosan attacks on asphalt, rubber, Styrofoam, even thin sheets of soft metal, in the insects' search for something edible. Their massive multi-million member colonies can reduce a solid house to uninhabitability within months. (Our native bugs' colonies typically have a couple of hundred thousand members.) Unlike their more genteel American cousins, they also attack and kill live trees.

Henderson’s bug commentary alternates between that of dispassionate scientist and of the mischievous boy who likes to dangle wriggling insects in your face. “If you were to pluck the queen out of the colony, and allow the rest of the colony to sit there, a number of female workers will develop into new queens.” He breaks into a gap-toothed grin. “It’s sort of like that scary movie where you blow up the monster and it’s a bunch of little pieces. And every one of those develops into another monster.”

Termites, Termites, Everywhere

In a parking area on one of the French Quarter's typically charming streets, Henderson and I run into redheaded, husky Ernie Thomas, who manages 32 French Quarter apartment houses. Ernie's nightmares are as bug-infested as his buildings. He tells us he dreamed of doing battle in his attic with a termite the size of a Volkswagen. It doesn't sound any worse than what he sees at work every day of swarming season. "I go in there and there are thousands and thousands of dead termites everywhere - on the floor, in the lampshades, in the light covers. They like to go into the light. In the toilet, I've seen just a solid layer of them, half an inch thick, floating."

Outside Ernie's office, sections of the wooden catwalks and stairs to the upper stories look as porous as honeycomb.

That damage is probably new, Henderson says, because he sees evidence elsewhere of recent repair.

As Henderson leads me deeper into the French Quarter, I gawk at the old-world architecture, the intricate ironwork. He brings me back to earth by pointing out a thick termite mud tunnel above a graceful arched doorway. The blind bugs build these tubes, really termite highways, of dirt, chewed wood, and termite feces. He leans on the seemingly solid wooden door frame and it bends inward like rubber. (Termites typically start munching deep inside the wood and chew their way outward.) A few doors down, he finds another, larger mud tube. "That's a lot of termite activity oozing out," he says, smirking like a kid hoping to gross-out a grown-up.

Coptotermes formosanus shiraki, as Formosans are formally known, probably arrived as stowaways on ships returning to New Orleans from Asia after World War II. Tucked into wooden supply crates, and hidden deep inside imported exotic woods, may have been just a few tiny insects. But, as with termites' close relatives, the cockroaches, that's enough to begin a massive infestation.

"When a colony gets started, there's one male and one female," says Henderson. "They will produce 30 individuals in one year. In two years, maybe 70 individuals are in that colony. Then you start getting exponential growth." Within ten years, he says, the colony that started as the nest of one happy Formosan couple can easily have 10 million voracious little termite mouths to feed.

It's been more than fifty years since the first Formosan termites came ashore here. That's plenty of time to make billions of bugs.

Next page: Tales from the termite wars: Formosans chew their way north, south, east and west...

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