Jan 27, 2009
He was short and hard and wiry, his inquisitive brown eyes wide set and wondering above a broad nose and a mouth whose ready smile lost nothing from the absence of teeth between the two top canines. He stood at our front door one Sunday morning flanked by two tall impassive policemen in pith helmets and khaki tunics and lavalava skirts. He explained to me in halting and embarrassed english that he had defaulted on payment of a ten shilling fine imposed on him for drinking methylated spirits. He was on his way to prison between the two policemen when God had come to him and suggested that I, as the supervisor of the beetle gang in which he was employed, might offer him succour.
I was of a mind to wish that God would mind his own business, and leave me out of his calculations, but Laifaga was a good little worker and I was reluctant to see him incarcerated up at Tafaigata while the rhinoceros beetles rejoiced in his absence.
The rhinoceros beetle was the number one pest of coconuts in the pacific, and was, in fact the reason that I, as a newly fledged entomologist, had been employed in Samoa to maintain the South Pacific Commission's bulwark against its spread to the other islands. The adult insect is a robust beetle about four or five centimetres long, and sufficiently stoutly armoured that if you tread on one it will simply cause a depression in the soil, and will get up and walk away when you have gone. The habit of the female is to wedge itself between the bases of the emerging coconut fronds, lacerating the fibres with its horn, and feeding on the exuding juices. If the young frond is only partly severed, the resulting frond will unfold with its fan of leaflets trimmed, notched and mutilated, but it is not unusual for the growing point of the palm to be destroyed in which case it dies. When the beetle has finished feeding she deposits her eggs in or under dead logs, either those of fallen dead coconuts or other sorts of trees, or even in compost or in sawdust dumps if they are somewhat decomposed. The larva which hatches from the eggs is a creamy coloured, C-shaped grub, somewhat like a very large grass grub, to which it is distantly related. When fully grown (after about 3 months) it is about 8 centimetres long. It then burrows deeply, up to a metre, and pupates, to emerge three weeks later as an adult which mates and starts the process again.
Control consists of destroying the larval habitat by burning logs and stumps or dumping them into the sea, or by treating compost or sawdust dumps with insecticide at intervals of three or four months to destroy developing larvae. However, the adults can fly considerable distances, and since they are attracted to lights, ships in the harbour at Apia were obliged to cease loading during the hours of darkness, up anchor, and lie outside the reef until morning. Even this was not much use, for a test I did with a sort of merry-go-round I made, showed that a beetle could remain continuously airborne for 40 minutes, and flying at a rate of about 8 kph, could cover a distance of perhaps 5 kilometres in that time, so ship would need to lie well off shore, not just outside the reef. So a better technique was to treat the crowns of all the palms near the port with a mixture of insecticide and sawdust, rammed in between the fronds, so that a beetle would be killed while it was trying to burrow through the mixture to get to the source of juice. Of course the treatment had to be repeated each month as each new set of fronds unfolded, so it required a few nimble fellows like Laifaga to shin up each palm each month to replenish the mixture.
Besides this, Laifaga was immensely strong, which counted for a lot when it came to stacking logs for burning or dumping them into the sea. It was said that he could carry onto a truck, a 50 kilogram sack of cocoa beans on each shoulder with a third sack laid across on top of them. As Uncle Ferris said of the rice-carrying coolies in Cairo, if their little legs had been made of spring steel, you wouldn't have expected them to withstand the strain.
So Laifaga was too valuable to me to have him passing his time hoeing vegetables at the prison. I paid up, and seemed to achieve a sort of holiness in his eyes thereafter.