EMPIRE INSECTS

Hokitika Guardian, 9 March 1931, Page 3

EMPIRE INSECTS

“HOGUES’ GALLERY FOB TINY CRIMINALS. SIX MILLION CAUGHT. LONDON. January 5. Six million insects have “moved house” into the new wing built by the Empire Marketing Board at the Natural History Museum, which was opened last week by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Acute overcrowding in the insect rooms, which contain specimens from every corner of the world, lias made necessary a new building for their display. The collection is a sort of “rogues’ gallery” for the use of the men who are policing the Empire’s most destructive and dangerous criminals—the insect pests. If a new insect crook tries to put an Emnire cron “on the spot” the entomologist’s first act, like the detective’s, is to identify the pest and to get its dossier from the criminal record. This information tells him the criminal’s habits and methods of wonting, and helps him to find ways and means of outwitting the enemy. INSECT GENERAL POST. Farmers, medical officers, missionaries, commercial men and agricultural specialists send specimens to be identified from all parts of the Empire. Bv every morning’s post arrive boxes containing an unknown beetle from the West Indies, a moth which is ruining crops in Fiji, an ant which lives cn railway sleepers in Palestine., or a

Ily sttsper ted of carrying: some fatal ile-ease in Central Africa. These are filed in special wooden specimen cases and scientists study such delicate signs as the insect’s lower jaw or the pattern of tlie veins on its wing to find its exact place in the tribe*.

Advice on practical control measures also is given. The new oiiild-

ing contains ‘‘controlled temperature” rooms where the insects can he reared under tropical conditions even in an English winter. Their life histories can then he studied and certain

methods of destruction tested. TWO STRANGE COLLECTORS

Three-quarters of a mill’on halterflies are arranged in one of the now rooms and have a romantic history. Two brothers who lived near Rlieims. in France, collected inserts as a hobhv One devoted himself to heei.les. the other collected butterflies, and the end of his li'e had amassed 1 .OOT.OOO specimens. When the collection '.o it)) for sale the Natural History AL'senm acquired the hulk of ii. Then the bntterllies. the most fragile of cnrws, had to bo transported to London. Thev were taken across Frame by roml, shinned with tender care over the "hannel. and finally delivered in Smith Kensington in thirteen specially padded

Other insects have reached the nvns--‘um in odd wavs. A bookseller bought an ancient cabinet of books in which he found number of dead butterflies. Thev turned out |o belong to an old Fnglish snecies which had sine(‘ hceonie extinct and to he worth ten guineas each. Thev now renose in the new insect wing. Attempts have been made to re-introduce several species of butterflies which had become extinct into butterfly sanctii ries in Fast Anglia. MOTHS FROM OIL FIFTH.

Some other valuable moths were collected by an onginoe- on a South American old-field. “The desire of the •noth for the flame” drove them to besiege his flares when he was working at night. Other specimens have been sent in by army officers who take up “hug-hunting” in Ilnur snare tinm in Iraq. F'gypt. Aden and the Indian frontin'.

Tin* insect wing will, nrovide room for scontists from overseas who wish t'< wo-k at the museum. Nowhere else in tin* Fuipirp. can thev find so comn'ete collection and the new ircnmimiclation should prove another valuable weapon in the war against inse t nests, for which the Km pi re Marketing Ro: rd has already allocated some £200.000. The Natural History Museum does for insect*' much what Kew does, through its Herbarium, for the plant work!.