Lantana Pest

Tahiti is Attacking it With a Bug

From Our Own Correspondent

Papeete, Nov. 1.

FORTY years ago, or thereabout, a Tahiti resident imported a tender potted plant for his garden.

He was an enthusiastic gardener. He hovered over the new plant he had intro duced, carefully packed fertiliser about its roots, watered it morning and even ing, and called in his neighbours to admire its marvellous growth.

Such was the genesis of the Franken stein Monster which has threatened agriculture, on Tahiti and its neighbour ing islands, with extinction. In the rich soil and propitious climate of Tahiti, the Lantana has become a stout, thorny bush, massed to form an impenetrable jungle, in valley and on mountain slope, where it is not constantly fought with machate and fire.

Through the enterprise of our Director of Agriculture, Monsieur Boubee, an enemy of the Lantana, in the form of an insect, Teleonemia Lantanae, has been brought to the colony. It is a bug, four millimetres in length, of a dull, grey brown, which devours the leaves and flowers so that Lantana becomes dry and dies.

This insect was thoroughly studied in Fiji and at Canberra, Australia. It has been found that it will attack only plants of the family of Verbenacees, and that it will not bite cattle or human beings. It is now being propagated and distributed in French Oceania.