CLEVER WHITE ANTS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20289, 23 December 1927, Page 11

CLEVER WHITE ANTS.

Residents o{ Queensland arc more or less familiar with the peculiar idiosyncrasies of the white ant —his insatiable appetitp and general penchant for destruction. Travellers are fond of telling “tall" stories of the achievements of -white ants, but' it remains for the British Weekly, a London magazine devoted mainly to religious topics, and of reputedly impeccable virtue, to disseminate a yarm of such appalling “ tallness ” that even a do Rougeinont would blush with vexation and curse his lack of imagination (remarks the Brisbane Courier). This journal publishes a review of “The Life of the White Ant," bv Maurice Maeterlinck, which states, with all the assurance of an entomological ox pert, that white ants are so fiercely voracious in Australia that “ a farmer m Queensland will leave a cart in a meadow in the evening; next morning all he finds is the iron. . . . The white ants in Australia show an uncanny cleverness in attacking scaled preserved tins. In a night they will raid a grocer's shop, devouring everything.' 1 The nature of the “cleverness ’’ is not explained in this voracious for it is surely able to swallow anything) journal, but presumably the nimble white ant uses the farmer’s cat t axle as a crowbar to break into the grocer's shop, and utilise* a fragment of spring as a tinopener I It seems a pity that the British Weekly did not go a hit furtbei and explain that in North Queensland rattlesnakes are kept as pets, and trained to stick their tails through keyholes of doors and rattle for a policeman whenever they see a white ant approaching.