FELLOWSHIP OFFERED

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30587, 2 November 1964, Page 8

FELLOWSHIP OFFERED

Although the Christchurch No. 1 Round Table and Christchurch Junior Chamber have offered to arrange finance for a doctoral fellowship to enable a research student to investigate ways of controlling house-flies in New Zealand, there have so far been no takers.

The suggestion is for the fellowship to be tenable at Lincoln College, where the student would work under Dr. R. A. Harrison, senior lecturer in charge of the Agricultural Zoology Department. Dr. Harrison said recently that, although the work was greatly needed, he himself was too busy to undertake it and the same was true of the staff of the Entomology Division of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. Various university zoology departments had been ap-

proached with the offer of the fellowship, but with no result. “It is a great pity no-one can be found to take this on,” said Dr. Harrison recently. “We badly need to know more about the ecology of the house-fly in this country, as otherwise our control measures must be based on no more than intelligent guesswork. “In particular, an investigation is required into the biology of the house-fly under typical urban conditions in New Zealand. The fly has apparently undergone considerable evolution in its habits over the last few decades. In the days of the horse, its favoured breeding-place was horse-manure, but nowadays grass-clippings seem to be far and away the preferred site. A knowledge of the extent and mechanism of this change would be most instructive.”