NEW ORLEANS -- They snack on schools and lunch on libraries. Their hunger for houses is matched only by their appetite for apartments. They literally feast on the French Quarter.
Termites are eating New Orleans.
But these are no ordinary termites. In this city of excess, where sandwiches are overstuffed, dripping affairs and the cuisine ranges from the heavily sauced to the hyper-spiced, it is appropriate that a particularly gluttonous species, the Formosan termite, is chewing its way through town.
While about a dozen Southern states are plagued by Formosan termites, which eat through wood nine times as fast as their native counterparts, the New Orleans area is believed to be the most heavily infested.
"We've got wood everywhere for them to eat," sighed Dennis Ring, a Louisiana State University Extension Service entomologist, among a battalion of researchers and pest-control operators enlisted in what has been called the Second Battle of New Orleans.
Formosan termites apparently arrived in this and other port cities after the end of World War II, stowaways in the packing material aboard military cargo ships returning home from Asia. They went largely undetected for decades, blending in with the native termites.
By the 1960s, it was increasingly apparent that what was eating New Orleans was much worse than the city had seen before. Soon the diagnosis was made: the Formosan termite, among the most destructive of the 2,300 known species of the insect.
Everything about them is bigger and badder: their colonies, their appetites, their capacity for destruction.
Ring offered this comparison: The average native termite colony will have 200,000 to 1 million members and will eat about 7 pounds of wood a year. A Formosan colony will have 2 million to 10 million members and eat about 1,000 pounds of wood a year.
"It's like a horror movie," said Marc Cooper, director of the Vieux Carre Commission, guardian of the French Quarter, which has been particularly besieged. "It's really scary. They're eating churches. They ate the clock tower at St. Patrick's. They eat 24 hours a day."
Decay from the inside
People here get a little crazy over this subject. And with good reason: Houses have collapsed, trees have toppled and telephone service has been halted after termites bored through underground cables in search of food.
Estimates of termite infestation here range wildly. The most pessimistic say 80 percent of the houses and 50 percent of the trees have termites. But a true census is impossible because much of what termites do is hidden away, underground or within walls, the extent of damage unknown until too late.
In fact, it often takes another disaster -- fire or hurricane, say -- to uncover the beasts within. Termites shy away from open air, nesting under cover and building mud tubes through which they'll travel when they need to leave the nest in search of food.
A 1988 fire at the historic Cabildo in the French Quarter, for example, did extensive damage and revealed that termites had been busily destroying the building from the inside out -- an alarming revelation for what is perhaps the state's most storied building. The Cabildo, which was built from 1795 to 1799 as the seat of the Spanish colonial government in New Orleans, is where the Louisiana Purchase was signed and the landmark segregation case Plessy vs. Ferguson was first heard.
"These 14-inch beams were charred through 2, 3 inches deep on all sides. But inside were live termite colonies. The temperature must have exceeded 1,000 degrees, and these termites lived through it all," Jim Sefcik said with a note of wonder.
Sefcik is director of the Louisiana State Museum, which is housed in the Cabildo and several other historic buildings. All have had extensive termite damage. Since the Cabildo fire, each has been painstakingly baited and treated for termites.
Recently, workers were finishing the treatment of another of the state museum buildings, the U.S. Mint. The 159-year-old structure is the only building in the country to have served as both a U.S. and Confederate mint.
Workers drilled holes every 12 inches in every piece of wood in the building, through which they injected a pesticide, and then plugged the hole.
"The chemical is absorbed into the wood, and then the termite won't eat it," said Armand Labourdette, one of the pest-control workers under contract to treat the Mint.
Chemical warfare
All around the French Quarter are signs of the full-scale war against termites.
"Tourists are really confused by these," said Alan Morgan, an LSU extension agent, prying off one of the countless metal discs embedded in the sidewalks. "People think they're for the Mardi Gras, that we put barricades up to control the crowds."
The discs are lids to underground monitoring and baiting stations. Researchers and pest-control operators use the underground canisters, filled with wood or another cellulose-based material, to determine whether termites are in a particular area. The canisters are dug up periodically to check for signs that termites have eaten the wood. If so, one of three chemicals being tested will be injected into the canister, with the hope that termites passing through the station will deliver the poison back to the nest.
Estimating the enemy
There is activity above ground as well. Sticky traps hang from many of the streetlights in the French Quarter, giving researchers a way of estimating the number of flying termites, or alates, that fill the air during their annual swarm. From April to early July, termite colonies send out the alates to breed and start new colonies.
Morgan and Ring are working on a termite-baiting project in the 15-block French Quarter. Nearly all of the more than 300 buildings there have been treated with one of several poisons in an experiment to find the most effective. In a densely built area like the Quarter, it does no good to spot-treat because termites will eventually find their way to the untreated oases and take up residence there.
The project is part of an effort funded by $10 million in federal money to both combat New Orleans' problem and serve as a demonstration project that other infested areas can learn from. Researchers have cast a wide net. Some are traveling to China to see if there are natural predators for Formosan termites that might be used here. Others are looking into better ways of attracting termites to the poisoned baits. And, of course, the search continues for chemicals that kill termites without causing harm to anything else.
Eradication problems
In fact, one reason the Formosan termites have been able to gain such a strong foothold here is the 1988 ban of such chemicals as chlordane, which was effective against termites but found to accumulate in the flesh of humans and other animals.
"In New Orleans, which has such a high water table, there's an even greater chance of any chemicals we use getting into the water supply," said Gregg Henderson, an LSU entomologist working on the termite problem.
Henderson and his team of researchers have focused on schools, where aging buildings and the always tight public funds for their upkeep have turned many into termite havens.
On this day, he's been called to Alcee Fortier High School, just outside the Garden District. There, a major renovation project has uncovered hidden problems. Inside a closet locked up for so long that no one could locate the key, a wooden chest that seemed to have been used for craft or sewing supplies had been taken over by a colony of termites.
A nest of millions
"There must be 4 to 5 million of them in there," Henderson said as he pried open the 32-by-16-by-12-inch chest and found it filled with the holey nest that termites construct. "I would suspect there are multiple queens in there."
A termite nest is an amazing if disgusting thing. It is spongy and porous, constructed of soil, digested wood and other termite secretions. Somewhere within is the queen's chamber. Most of the nest is composed of tunnels, used by worker termites to travel for takeout that they bring back home.
Henderson planned to get the termites out of the nest, use them in experiments and preserve their empty home as some sort of display.
It is but one nest in one school in a city filled with them. But then, the termites have had quite a head start on those who would eradicate them.
"Termites are the oldest social structure known. They've been around for 200 million years," Henderson said.
"To have survived for so many years, it's got to be a successful system."
Formosan termites
These voracious wood-eaters are perhaps the most devastating species of termite.
* Indigenous to Asia, Formosan termites apparently were brought to the United States by returning cargo ships after World War II.
* A colony can contain 10 million termites and eat 1,000 pounds of wood a year.
* In large nests, a queen can live for 15 years, laying an egg every 15 seconds for most of her life.