[International Pest Control] Adventures In Pest Paradise

I know what you’re thinking (as Magnum, P.I. used to say). You’re thinking what a great opportunity; living in paradise, no snow, no ice, no IRS…and you might be right. But as I found out, there’s a lot more to consider if you plan to live and work on the Asian side of "the pond."

Leaving the United States, where I’d had a "regular" pest management job for 10 years, to become a consultant in the Pacific proved — like everything else — to have its highs and low. It just had a lot more of them.

BIG DIFFERENCES. As an entomologist, one of the first things that struck me was the lack of diversity. I’m talking about the island flora and fauna. There is plenty of diversity in the people populating the islands but less diversity in tropical pests (at least not as much as I’d experienced back in the temperate zone).

The term "occasional invaders," for example, didn’t seem to apply. On the islands, most invaders are not occasional. Consider the leftover hippy who was attacked by giant centipedes on Guam. I was sent to investigate. Down a dirt road snaking through the jungle sat a shack that made me wonder if Gilligan’s Island had been shot on Guam. The place was surrounded by every imaginable jungle tree — mango, papaya, coconut and betel nut palms — not to mention the marijuana plants growing in a spare toilet bowl that sat outside all by itself like modern art decorating the place.

The shack’s friendly occupant, formerly of San Francisco, knew how to live. He got power from extension cords linked to his ex-wife’s house some distance through the jungle. Inside the hut was a stereo, computer and an elevated bed up near the ceiling. He offered me a drink and described the centipedes as black and up to eight inches long (probably poisonous Scolopendra sp.). He showed me the bites on his back. They were slightly larger than mosquito bites.

I was convinced John was telling the truth. I recommended a perimeter treatment, sticky traps and mosquito netting to protect his bed as it appeared the centipedes may have been dropping into the bed at night and biting when he rolled onto them. I later encountered centipede concerns on other islands. Some were colorful bluish-orange things a half-foot long and as big around as my little finger.

ANTS VS. TERMITES. Although we didn’t actually see any centipedes at the shack that day, we did find termites (Coptotermes vastator, similar to C. formosanus) tubing up the shack’s support poles. Centipedes notwithstanding, subterranean termites are the most injurious pests on Pacific islands. Coptotermes is queen here. Although most houses are concrete slabs with solid concrete walls, termites hit the expansion joints and consume the baseboards, trim, and whatever else they can find — fast. By the time the human residents notice, it’s often too late to save any of the wood.

The good news: termite baits can expect hits in less than a week, and "elimination" in a couple months. The bad news: the termites return just as fast. And the thin, limestone soils can make liquid treatments difficult.

It was a wonder termites could be so prevalent on islands where their arch enemies — the ants — seemed even more prevalent or at least more obvious. Ants were everywhere, but most of them lived in my apartment. No less than six species chose to cohabitate with me at various times. The crazy ants (Paratrechina longicornis and P. bourbonica), ghost ants (Tapinoma melanocephala), as well as Tetramorium lanuginosum, Pharaoh ants (Monomorium pharaonis) and their cousins (M. floricola) all found me an inhospitable host and were soon gone. But the carpenter ants (Camponotus sp.) and especially the long-legged ants (Anoplolepis gracilipes, also known as the yellow crazy ant) proved to be the proverbial mothers-in-law of ant-dom.

Here I must admit that, like many a technician, I just didn’t have or take enough time to stop those ants. I dusted them a bit with boric acid (the only pesticide I used), vacuumed them, and employed sanitation and exclusion as best I could. But still the ants came. Notorious foreign invaders, long-legged ants are medium-size yellow-brown ants. They would stream in at night under the front door of my apartment, cross the living room and raid the kitchen. If I’d left a pop can or anything fruity lying around, I’d have a hundred visitors greeting me when I woke up the next morning. "Good morning!" they would shout. "Welcome to the tropics!"

At last a simple remedy stopped the hordes from raiding my kitchen trash can. Forgoing the inconvenience of a tight-fitting lid, I instead put the trash can in a plastic basin into which I poured a couple inches of water, creating a moat around the trash can. Now my trash was safe (except from the phorid flies).

But soon, as if to mock me for using water against them, the long-legged ants attacked from a new direction. They started pouring in through the faucet in my bathtub! This time they had definitely achieved the element of surprise. Every time I went for a shower, a couple dozen ants would come spitting out of the faucet into the tub, then desperately try to save themselves by climbing up my legs. But again my massive human brain persevered over the super-organism’s collective intelligence: I used a rubber band to fasten a piece of screening over the faucet.

Another odd pest management solution came to me one time while I sat on the sofa typing on my laptop as I am now. A long-legged ant scout ventured right up to the keyboard and, to my horror, disappeared beneath the "delete" key. I watched for a moment, expecting the ant to find nothing edible and come out, while recalling that the term computer "bug" was coined a couple decades ago when an insect got inside a computer and messed it up. I blew on the "delete" key to try and coax the ant to come out, but it didn’t. By this time I could no longer resist the temptation growing inside me. I pressed the "delete" key, and never saw that ant again.

Even in the bedroom I wasn’t safe. Big honey-colored carpenter ants would occasionally find me during the night and more than once woke me by crawling across my face. It made me curse the geckos that also lived with me, for not pulling their weight. Then I remembered visiting the house of a fellow entomologist and seeing his ants eating a dead gecko. Was I in some kind of alternate universe where everything, including biological control, worked in reverse? Probably not, but pest management in the Pacific can be difficult.

PROBLEMATIC PEST PRESSURES. Overall pest diversity may be less simply because of the isolated nature of islands. But pest pressure is greater on tropical islands, and varies little between summer and winter. Nearly all of the islands’ pests are tourists, that is, they arrive on the islands by boat or plane. Some enjoy the island lifestyle so much they become established and won’t go home. Unfortunately the sudden arrival of foreign invaders like the long-legged ant often results in the destruction of the islands’ native plants and animals.

Rats are another example. I lived in the Midwest for some 30-odd years but never had I seen a cornfield consumed by rats. Nor had I ever seen anyone baiting rats with toasted coconut meat (which works), or trying to control them by mixing flour with concrete (which doesn’t work). No, I never saw a tropical rat suddenly stiffen as the cement powder solidified in its gut. But I did see a lot of healthy looking rats — roof rats and Norways too. Next to termites, I’d rank rats as the islands’ second most important pest.

In addition to their occasional consumption of cornfields, rats favored the usual suspect places; warehouses, restaurants, hotels. I saw them wherever I went. They appeared quite comfortable with my presence. They foraged in broad daylight outside my apartment on Saipan, ran down the hallways inside my building in Manila, carried away whole boxes of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts from the gift shop of a resort hotel on Guam and on more than one occasion watched me eat meals in restaurants.

Then one morning I went out to my Jeep and realized I’d made the mistake of leaving a free refill of Diet Coke inside. The cup’s plastic lid was chewed a bit and the Diet Coke was gone. And if that wasn’t enough, the rat left me a little present right in the middle of the driver’s seat. For a microsecond, I considered buying another Diet Coke and some concrete. But I was satisfied when I thought how surprised that rat was going to be when he realized there weren’t any calories in Diet Coke.

MAKING A DIFFERENCE. "Can’t you DO something?" people ask. Sure, but as usual it’s just not that easy. There are major problems encountered by pest management professionals in this part of the world. There is a general lack of knowledge, to be sure. After all, that’s why I was there, to develop and deliver training to technicians. And this I did, doing my best to make an impact, despite many unforeseen circumstances.

One unavoidable circumstance is that on most Pacific islands, English is a second language, at best. Filipino pest management professionals speak and understand English to varying degrees, their first language being any one of the country’s numerous dialects. Despite their hard work and enthusiasm for learning, quizzing Filipinos on material presented in English proved to be the same as giving an English test. The scores were invariably predictable, corresponding precisely to each technician’s level of English understanding.

As you can imagine, the language barrier was even thicker in Taiwan. Fortunately my Chinese host spoke English very well. He managed a four-man sub-office in Taipei. He was a good manager with a lot of technical knowledge who should’ve gotten more recognition, if only for his courage in walking through crowded public buildings zapping drain flies with an electrified fly swatter. The thing was plastic, battery operated and looked like a toy tennis racket.

Another major impediment to effective pest management was the general lack of supplies. Obviously logistics are a consideration when you need something shipped from the northeast United States to a flyspeck on the map 10,000 miles away. Shipping costs are high, and so is the confusion factor, the prevailing Pacific "fog" if you will. For example, someone once sent a letter to me at my address on Guam. Guam is an island territory and part of the U.S., a fact that seems to confuse even our own U.S. Postal Service. The letter finally arrived, several weeks late, bearing the stamp of the country it was first routed to: GUATEMALA.

But of course distance doesn’t matter if distributors are unwilling to make certain products available, or require them to be ordered in such quantity that few of the islands’ relatively small companies can afford to purchase them. Then there are import taxes and fees.

All this, and a fair degree of mismanagement, means technicians frequently don’t have what they need to do the job. Sound familiar? Those I worked with were often forced to use inferior materials, and sometimes none at all. One resourceful veteran proudly serviced Manila’s most prestigious hotel — where a one-night stay would’ve cost him more than a month’s salary. He told me how he handled mice in the guest rooms. Lacking the appropriate materials, that’s exactly what he did — he handled them. He chased them down and grabbed them with his bare hands.

Perhaps the overriding and seemingly insurmountable Pacific problem is that of depressed economies. In the Philippines a good pest technician is "lucky" to earn some 10,000 pesos a month — the equivalent of about $200. Sure the cost of living there is much lower — but not that low. I marveled at the incredible work ethic, enthusiasm and friendliness these people showed in the face of harsh conditions and maltreatment that we Americans rarely ever see.

This is not to say there isn’t money out there. There is, but most of it seems to end up in the pockets of a few "privileged" individuals. Corruption in its many forms seems to be an enduring tradition on some Pacific islands, and its effects inescapable. This is "the price of doing business" which only serves to further depress the islands’ troubled economies and their people.

MORE ADVENTURES. Still interested in adventures in paradise? Don’t get me wrong — they are interesting — the good, bad, even the ugly. Fortunately we tend to best remember the good. I recall my three days on Yap, a cluster of islands that is part of the Federated States of Micronesia. You can’t just fly in and out of Yap the same day. The plane flies in and out every three or four days. And that was good because my only assignment was to check some termite bait stations at a resort hotel.

When the plane arrived, a bronze, bare-breasted native girl greeted me (and the other passengers). I proceeded to the hotel where I was given room #1. There were two dozen rooms. I was the only guest. I unpacked, gathered the equipment, and serviced the bait stations in about three hours. Then I showered off the sweat and left the hotel with my camera. I’d walked about two blocks of the four-block town when I happened to bump into a gentleman from Oregon who offered to show me the island. The guy had been a bank manager on Yap. He told me the bank had, as collateral for loans, actually accepted the traditional Yap currency — huge stone coins some five feet in diameter — the world’s largest money.

I wasted no time calculating the odds against bumping into this guy on a remote Pacific island at exactly the right place and time to be my personal tour guide. I spent the whole day with him touring around in his Japanese sedan with right-hand drive, learning about Yap and snapping photos of the beautiful jungles.

At the end of my stay I had an incredible island-style dinner on the hotel’s veranda overlooking the bay. Then a cool tropical breeze brought a heavy downpour, wetting the lush jungle as I pondered the strange sequence of events that had gotten me where I was.

One day while sitting at my desk back in Indiana I’d received an e-mail from an entomologist on the island of Saipan. I actually knew where that was because my dad had flown there during WWII. The entomologist had his quarantine hat on that day and was called out when a ship brought in a container full of angry yellowjackets. He’d e-mailed me, asking if I could help identify them and what I thought the potential was for the yellowjackets to escape and establish themselves there on Saipan.

In the past I’d handled thousands of questions about pest identification and management, but this one was certainly one of the most intriguing. I tried to help, invested two bucks and sent him a packet of information. As it turned out the yellowjackets were from the Northwest U.S., they did not become established on Saipan and my $2-investment soon translated into two overseas job offers.

About a year later I found myself in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, spending those three wonderful days on Yap, the best three days I’d had in a long time. It just didn’t get any better than that. Well, not much better anyway — but that’s another story.

The author is an entomologist and private consultant specializing in structural pest management and its training. He can be reached at ccolwell@pctonline.com.