• writing
• about
• contact

Download PDF

THE SWARM

An Eruption in the French Quarter

by Duncan Murrell
Harper's Magazine
August 2005


ON A MAY EVENING in New Orleans, three days after Mother's Day, I stand beneath a large live oak at the corner of St. Peter and Decatur Streets with two young men in T-shirts. One fiddles with a barometric gauge and wind meter while the other climbs up an aluminum ladder, peering into the main fork of the tree. Parents and children wander past us on the sidewalk, lugging bags and packages from the Hard Rock Cafe and the Café du Monde. Some stop briefly to ask us about our work. Oh, they say.

The change happens so quickly and with so little fuss that at first all I notice is that the halo around the streetlamps has atomized into floating, darting pieces, hovering for a while before falling to the ground. I am the last of the three to realize what this means.

"Dude!" says the man who was on the ladder, Dr. Matt Messenger. He leaps over the cast-iron fence that encloses the tree and heads up toward the Riverwalk and the levee. "Oh, man!" he calls, disappearing out of sight. I follow the sound of his voice, over the fence, through a low swampy area riddled with bee's nests, up over the next wall, until I'm standing in a parking lot within sight of the dark, silent river. Matt and I watch the termites together.

They're in the air, flowing up over the levee, emerging out of the darkness from God knows where. They could be coming from the railroad ties on the line that runs parallel to the river's edge, or they could be coming from the planters that dot the Riverwalk. They could even be coming from Algiers on the other side of the river, carried up and over the water by the gentle, steady breeze. The winged reproductives of Coptotermes formosanus glide on, wherever they're from, past the parking lot and through the trees, over Decatur Street and above the mules standing ready in harness at the south end of Jackson Square. They pass over the little park, an airborne current of hundreds, each periodically catching the light in its translucent wings. At St. Louis Cathedral the stream divides and twists to either side, funneling into the space between the Cathedral and the old Creole town houses, accelerating up Pere Antoine and Pirate's Alleys until the termites disappear into the heart of the French Quarter.

I return to the tree where the other man, Aaron Mullins, a doctoral student, has found an alate crawling on his sleeve. I stand next to him and watch as he lets the creature crawl around his hand. I think I see an antenna with an elongated flagellum waving about, dark against the white of Aaron's palm. The termite, satisfied that it's found solid ground, reaches back and rips off its wings, transforming itself from a light-seeking winged creature into a terrestrial suddenly desperate for darkness and the companionship of a mate. The four wings lie in a pile on Aaron's thumb, each almost twice as long as the insect and nearly invisible except for their faint, nut-brown color. The wings shudder and flit about before they catch the breeze and blow off into the dark. Aaron lets the termite crawl from his hand onto the sidewalk, and we watch for a few minutes as it races in circles looking for a companion. I notice that another alate has landed in my hair, and I let it crawl down my face until I'm able to hold up my hand and let it run along my knuckles and my palm. When this termite also has reached back and removed its wings, I set it down near the first termite, and we watch to see if they'll find each other, but they just run in their separate circles until both disappear into the grass.

"Too bad," I say. Aaron simply walks away to record more data.

In that moment, I know I have begun to assign the termites the powers of volition and desire, the experiences of pain and regret. I am embarrassed by this, and dare not mention it to the scientists. The alates knock about trying to find one another, a mostly futile search that will end in failure and a quick death for almost all. I have fallen into the trap that captures so many lay observers of the social insects, Hymenoptera (ants, wasps, bees) and Isoptera (termites), which is the easy equation of sociality with culture, and therefore humanity. In my unscientific reverie, I imagine I am seeing not only my own world mimicked and mocked by an invertebrate but my own body split and disassembled into cells, exposed by proxy and revealed briefly to the light. The termite swarm has inspired an addled, credulous melancholy.

"Nature is an infinite sphere," Pascal wrote, "whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." I stand on the levee, wishing I had a beer, and consider whether I'm just another arrangement of matter, one way of protecting and multiplying genes, a mere collection of information. I watch hundreds more termites fly past the cathedral and momentarily entertain the thought that they could pass through me without my noticing, like rain through a cloud. Borges said that Pascal experienced "vertigo, fright, and solitude" while contemplating the physical world, and why the hell wouldn't he? Borges also pointed out that Pascal's metaphor of the infinite sphere was once used by the ancients to describe God.

My body is a mystery to me. It contains too many moving and multiplying parts working through processes I barely understand and cannot see. I fear this part of life, the unknown body, the old bone sack. The cells of the body are cryptic, until they fail or they multiply so rapidly that organs begin to shut down. I am afraid because they are cryptic, which is also the word often used in the scientific literature to describe the most basic problem in the study of subterranean termites: they spend their lives underground, out of sight, until once a year (in the case of C. Formosanus) some of them burst free and, no longer controlled by their ancient queen, set off in flight seeking their own mate and new foraging grounds. Unbearably fecund, nature's center breaks and cannot be contained. It flutters toward the circumference, toward the opposite sex and some available wood, preferably soft.

Finally I rouse myself to go whooping it up around the oak tree, chasing alates from lamppost to lamppost with the others. They are just insects. These particular insects are evident in extremis, they're invertebrates that annoy and threaten and disrupt our illusion of equilibrium, which is enough to classify them as a pestilence, purveyors of rot. The effort to kill off C. formosanus in New Orleans, or at least to control the overwhelming invasion, is an effort to settle the question of who owns the place, a deltaic crescent of mud and sand and dirt at a bend near the end of the Mississippi River. This is a real struggle, not a figurative one.

And yet the alates part at St. Louis's like water around a boulder, and I think they are beautiful.

THERE IS ALLURE in the city's rot, and not a few native authors have bridged the short etymological gap between decay and decadence, as if the city's louche human history was written in the twisted, rotten, vinewrapped beams of the old Creole cottages of the French Quarter, the Victorian shotguns in Fauborg Marigny, and the rambling Queen Anne piles in the Garden District and Uptown. The city is wet, sunken, overgrown, and tropical, and marks-in our imaginations as well as on our maps-the dead center of our country's underbelly. Of course the city is the preferred home of termites and wood mold and strippers and drunks and obese hot-dog vendors and moviegoers at odds with the universe. Look in the eyes of the New York television reporter making his report from the Quarter-The bug that ate New Orleans!-and you can see the city as a frontier land of plagues, oddities, and ghosts ruling over chaos.

I came to see the termite swarm. Not because it's a typical, predictable, and unremarkable peculiarity of the city but because it is the opposite. It is something extraordinary that, if not for a relatively recent historical accident, would not be a feature of New Orleans life. Yet the invasion also seems correct and proper. It prompts wonder at all the other historical accidents that have shaped New Orleans, bestowing upon it a unique culture, architecture, art, and, above all, a certain reputation. It raises the question of whether something is an accident if it is of a piece with all the other accidents.

The Formosan is an invader, an alien, a resident of the city for only the last fifty years or so, according to the educated guesses of scientists and pest-control operators. The termite found its way to New Orleans and flourished there by taking advantage of what invasion biologists call "nonlinearities," or what the rest of us might call the derangement and periodic chaos of human settlement and society.

THERE ARE SEVERAL reasons why C. formosanus has had so much success invading the French Quarter, most of the city of New Orleans, and great tracts of the Gulf Coast, moving ever northward. They're able to survive long trips across oceans in dank cargo holds, or in the mulch of a potted exotic plant, or in railroad ties being moved across the country. They'll attack live trees much more often than do native termites, ruthlessly seeking out wounds and other openings in the trees' repellent "live" layer, tunneling into the dead center, establishing a colony, and setting about the job of hollowing out the whole thing. Unlike native subterranean termites, they can build their nests aboveground in the rafters of old buildings, as long as they have some access to water. Their construction practices are unusual among termites, especially their hard, dense nests of carton material, a combination of excrement, masticated wood, saliva, and soil, divided into a maze of tiny corridors and cells. When they're separated from a nearby water source, the termites will forage for water, carry it back in their crops, and deposit it in the nest as if it were a giant sponge. Otherwise the nest is their home, which they ceaselessly expand.

Where the Formosans are foraging -in the studs of a wall, for instance -the carton sometimes takes the shape of the very thing they're eating. Pest-control operators in New Orleans told me many of stories of ripping out drywall to expose what looked from a distance like solid two-by-four framing pieces, only to find that they were looking at carton nests, the ghosts of a wall long since consumed.

This is enough to distinguish the Formosan from other termites, but what most distinguishes C. formosanus from the native subterranean termites in Louisiana (the Eastern subterranean termite, Reticulitermes flavipes, and the dark southern subterranean termite, Reticulitermes virginicus, to name the two most common) is its ability to reproduce. A good-sized, mature, native subterranean colony averages 200,000 to 500,000 individuals, but a mature Formosan colony is bigger by an order of magnitude-2 to 5 million individuals, and often many more. In the mid-1990s the Algiers Regional Library, across the river from the French Quarter, was infested with at least 60 million termites, the largest known colony of termites in the world. Scientists suspect the colonies that have invaded the French Quarter dwarf those at the library. In both cases, the Formosans have carved out a niche in the ecosystem not fully exploited by the native species, which is a defining characteristic of foreign species that aren't merely "foreign" but also "invasive."

The Formosans, even with their large colonies, have not crowded out the native termites entirely; they just exploit the full range of cellulose and lignocellulose food sources with greater persistence. Although they will compete for the normal sources of food- a house, a dead tree, an old rotted boat-the Formosans also have found food where the natives rarely bother to look: in live trees, in the upper reaches of tall buildings, in the paper insulation in plastic-coated power cables, in creosote-coated railroad ties and telephone poles. The millions of Formosan workers bring immense foraging pressure to the areas around their colonies, and they are not deterred by what at first appears to be a fruitless search. This has given rise to the myth that Formosan termites will eat their way through a concrete wall. What they will do is sacrifice many thousands of workers in an effort to find the one imperfection in that wall, the one circuitous passage formed by the tiniest series of trapped air bubbles in an isolated part of the concrete, and when Termite #5,643,895 gets through and discovers food, soon the whole colony knows the way. Perfection is so rare, and the Formosans so numerous, that few man-made structures can resist them.

THE SOURCE of this strength-in-numbers strategy is the colony's queen, a monstrous creature who lives at the center of the colony, tended by a court of workers, soldiers, and her king. The colony is in her thrall-each worker, soldier, nymph, and secondary reproductive. All of them are the size and color of a small piece of white rice. They obey a series of dicta she issues in the little-understood language of pheromones and other chemicals passed along by trophallaxis-food sharing-and the termites' incessant grooming of one another. In this way she instructs some of the youngsters to develop into soldiers, others into workers, and a few others to transform into alates who will eventually sprout wings and, come May, take flight to start their own colonies. She lives as long as twenty years, sometimes longer. She may have begun her colony during a swarm years before, when she was just a winged alate scurrying around the ground, lucky enough to find a mate and a good source of wood in which to excavate a nuptial chamber, also known as a copularium. If so, she immediately began producing eggs fertilized by her king, and sometime during her first decade of life the colony passed the one million mark, every one of them her children. Around her eighth year, she reached full sexual maturity, what termitologists call her physogastric state. Now she is grotesquely huge, mostly a giant white egg sack as long and thick as a person's little finger. Her head and thorax are tiny compared with the rest of her, and she is unable to move or feed herself. She can only issue orders and lay eggs, as many as two thousand a day almost every day of her long life.

The queen's longevity, her slithery, wormy egg sack, and her unusual lifestyle lead most who have seen a queen to describe her alternately in terms of awe and revulsion. While I was in New Orleans, a pest-control company sent word to the New Orleans Mosquito & Termite Control Board that it had dug up the center of a Formosan nest and found a queen. In digging up the colony, they had broken the intricate web of communication tying the colony together, and all was mass confusion among the termites. As they videotaped, it became apparent that the termites didn't recognize their queen anymore. Or maybe they did, only with new eyes. Unable to move, she was torn apart by workers and even soldiers, who rarely feed for themselves. She had been one of the things of the dark, her instincts, desires, and genetics replicated hundreds of thousands of times. When they could not be controlled, she died. As a boy, I came to know of such things in a recurring bad dream, the only one that has stuck with me.

EUGENE MARAIS, the depressive South African naturalist and journalist of the early twentieth century, should be considered the first philosopher of the termitary, a man who spent much of his life puzzling out the dimensions of the swarm and its meaning. The termites he knew best were the builders of giant, intricate mounds, the various species of Macrotermes, whose nests are often mistaken at a distance for small huts, and collections of them for villages. "We are ourselves no more than dead termitaries, through which circulates a living substance," he wrote in The Soul of the White Ant (1937), his classic work of obsessive observation. This was not a benign analogy for Marais; it was hardly an analogy at all. Marais believed that colonies of termites were distinct, compound organisms not unlike the human body, that every component from queen to worker served a function not just analogous but identical to the function of our own hearts and livers and brains and blood cells. Marais thought that the termite colony lacked only the power to move together as one organism, and that someday they would develop even that skill.

Although humans were nothing more than dead termitaries, Marais was not willing to saddle the termite with the burden of being man's perfect equivalent. Instead, he assigned the termite a group soul, a "race memory" shared by the colony, which dictated the nature and organization of the termites' lives, something that didn't require individual cognition or individual awareness of their world's peculiarities. This seemed a blessing to Marais, a lifelong drug addict who had suffered terribly the death of his young wife in childbirth. He later retreated into the bush for years at a time, avoiding humans in favor of baboons and termites, and killed himself with a shotgun in 1936.

It was individual awareness, especially of nature, that frightened Marais and drove him into morphine stupors. He called it psyche. "For we seek in vain in nature for love, sympathy, pity, justice, altruism, protection of the innocent and weak," he wrote. "If Nature possesses a universal psyche, it is one far above the common and most impelling feelings of the human psyche. She certainly has never wept in sympathy, nor stretched a hand protectively over even the most beautiful or innocent of her creatures."

MY OWN PURSUIT of the swarm took me up to the northern end of the city, past the long narrow park between West End and Pontchartrain boulevards that was once the New Basin Canal, dug by thousands of Irishmen who were buried where they died of yellow fever and malaria. Just past the Celtic cross at the top of the park, I turn right onto Robert E. Lee Boulevard, past the Catholic girls of Mt. Carmel Academy in their tartan and white strolling into the road bearing cell phones, and drive to the northeast corner of City Park, where the USDA's Agricultural Research Service has its Southern Regional Research Center. The main building, a classic of the Federal Deco style of the 1930s, is tall and looms over a broad green lawn dotted with gardens and research plots.

I'm met at the door by an elfin man in jeans and a billowing, white buttondown shirt, all of it held together by a large belt buckle in the shape of a scorpion. He hands me his card, part of which has been punched in the shape of a termite. Dr. Weste Osbrink, research entomologist.

"Got to sign you in," he says. "Terrorists." He talks with his hands, and the large set of keys he carries through his belt loop jangles against his knife pouch as we walk up to his laboratory. On his door he's posted certificates testifying to his daughter's prowess in the martial art of tae kwon do. His laboratory, at first glance, seems much more like a garage or a wood shop than a laboratory. Everything of value-his books, his drills, the pieces of furniture -has been marked with red spray paint. There are ant farms here, piles of Pest Control Technology Magazine there.

He has obviously practiced his lecture on what scientists know about the Formosan. He draws out the words he wants to emphasize: colony coooooperation, feeding presssssssure, chemical resissssssstance. When I say something he already knows, which typically is every time I speak, he says yup yup yup yup to keep the conversation moving.

It turns out scientists know quite a lot about the Formosan, but not nearly as much as you would suppose would be known about one of the most primitive termites of an order that has survived virtually unchanged since the Cretaceous period, appearing more than 100 million years before the first hominids began loping around and framing up houses. It's surprising to realize, for instance, that scientists aren't quite sure how sibling Formosans find themselves branching off toward soldierhood or workerhood, morphologies so different it's hard to reconcile that a soldier and a worker could share the same two parents. They still puzzle over the reasons some of the termites in the colony switch developmental paths. They're not sure why Formosans prefer one type of wood over another, or how they choose their mates, or how exactly the various chemicals circulating through their colonies control behavior, or how far they can fly.

[There are more than 750,000 known species of insects, and likely many millions more still unidentified. Osbrink told me it isn't until an insect insinuates itself into human society, usually without welcome, that we begin to pay attention. "The roots of entomology," he says, "are in plague and pestilence."]

Osbrink has small starter colonies of Formosans stored all over his laboratory. While we stand cramped between his lab bench and the bookshelf spraypainted red, he searches around for boxes of termites he wants to show me, once opening up a cabinet and pushing aside some old newspapers to find a group of termites he had momentarily misplaced. He pulls termites out of buckets and off shelves and throws them together in a rectangular plastic tub to see if they'll kill one another while we watch. They mostly avoid contact, running madly in circles searching for a way out.

When he cleans up, I notice that a few have fallen to his bench. This worries me, but Osbrink merely sweeps the little workers onto the floor. "Oh, they'll dry up in a day, no problem," Osbrink laughs. "Harmless." I had forgotten that the termite needs water, food, and a connection to its colony. Absent those three, the termite is like a leaf suddenly detached from its tree, a useless and dying thing. The newest advances in termitology-or, at least, in the control of the Formosan-all focus on this definitive characteristic of the social insects, the essential need of connection. The ARS building, I discovered, was full of scientists looking for ways to either break that connection or take advantage of it.

I was tempted to ask Osbrink his opinion of Marais's "group soul" theory, but I knew it was too naive and antiscientific to be of much interest to a man pointing with a stick at maps of the French Quarter like a colonel planning an attack. He would not even say whether he had any grudging admiration for the insect and its adaptations. It was not a question he asked himself.

The federal scientists are part of Operation Full Stop, a joint federal, state, and local project begun in 1998 to "develop strategies and tools for suppressing this unwanted invader," especially in the French Quarter. It's Full Stop that supports the ARS scientists and their dozens of research projects, which range from examinations of the termite's aggressive behavior, to its taste for certain woods, to the composition and weaknesses of its gut fauna, to the testing of certain antagonistic bacteria, to the development of infrared detection technology. At its heart, Operation Full Stop embraces a concept of pest control that had not been attempted previously on a scale large enough to eradicate termites. The project takes an "area-wide" approach, which assumes that it's not sufficient to kill isolated groups of termites here and there, especially when confronted by a species enjoying such magnificent reproductive success. You have to strike at the center.

It's long been known that killing the queen and would-be queens of a colony is enough to eradicate the colony itself, a practice more effective in places where termites build mounds. But a giant termite mound, unlike a hidden Formosan colony, is an isolated and obvious thing; it announces its presence. The alate flight is one obvious way of starting new colonies, but new colonies of Formosans also can be formed by a process of "budding," whereby a group from a mature colony moves off and establishes a new, smaller colony, with a new reproductive pair, without ever breaking the surface and revealing itself. In Armstrong Park researchers have successfully killed off large mature colonies, only to find later that another group they hadn't known existed had moved into the dead colony's territory, often in a matter of a few months.

In many ways, the eradication and research program in the French Quarter has all the characteristics of a public-health project, requiring the cooperation of all who live and own property in the Quarter's 110 blocks, frequent inspections, diagnosis, treatment, and a public-education project. It's as if the scientists are fighting a chronic, communicable disease.

In the seven years they've been counting in the research area, the number of alates that take flight in the spring has been reduced by 50 percent but no more. The program has succeeded in the French Quarter to an extent but there has been no documented reduction in alates in other areas of New Orleans. The health of the Formosans elsewhere in the city is mostly a mystery until a house falls in.

ADRIAN DE PAUGER, the French military engineer who laid out the French Quarter in 1721, intended it to be a regimented and easily defendable grid of roughly 100 blocks, each divided into twelve precisely drawn lots. The Quarter is still laid out this way, with some modification and expansion over the years, yet it's anything but regimented and uniform within the edges of those blocks. Living cryptically isn't just for termites in New Orleans. The interior courtyards and shaded loggia withhold multitudes.

I had been told that one of the reasons the French Quarter was such a perfect place for termites was because the buildings were constructed in peculiar ways, which made it simultaneously easy for the termites to find sanctuary and hard to be found. Buildings and houses share walls, one after the other, block by block, allowing the termites to move from one house to another at will. By order of the Spanish cabildo, after the fires of 1788 and 1794 that destroyed much of the Quarter, houses were supposed to be built of brick or brick between posts, and were supposed to have relatively flat roofs. The flatter roofs, on which water often collects, are perfect landing strips for alates, complete with all the necessities-wood, moisture, secrecy. The brick-between- post construction technique is good for retarding fires, but the beams themselves, which look like bones pressed in among the flesh of bricks, are convenient avenues for termites. The bricks, made locally, were high in sand content and therefore retain moisture, another boon to the termites. The fires also shifted the architectural character from French to something resembling a Spanish tropical style. This meant that exterior walls were often plastered or stuccoed. To this day houses that are built by the brick-betweenposts method have to be stuccoed according to the rules of the historic district. Stucco is beautiful and historically correct, but it can also trap moisture against the walls and conceal termite tunnels.

The weird intricacies of French Quarter buildings are daunting to the termite killer. Once I followed a group of scientists as they hunted termites in the apartments above a restaurant on a well-known corner of Decatur Street, where the night before I'd watched Norway rats running along the pipes that undergird the galleries facing Jackson Square. It was an old building, an old Creole town house. We walked through the dining room, through the kitchen and the prep area, back out onto a side street, and then back in through a small door that took us up some stairs past a number of rooms packed full of junk but lit by fan transoms, until we were up in the apartment area, looking out through huge single- story windows onto a patchwork of roofs and empty spaces. It was some time before I realized that I was standing in what would have been the loggia that lined an interior courtyard, and that the courtyard itself had been overrun by small commercial buildings defined by a series of narrow passageways and alleys running this way and that.

We walked along the apartment level, the scientists armed with infrared detection devices and a microwave motion detector, each trained on the beams and facie boards and soffits that crisscrossed the hallways and disappeared into the apartments. We went into the apartments, shouting, "Termite control!" but found no termites. "This is the best part of my job," one of them said. "You get to see how people live. You see everyone from the rich to the poor, and the vampires."

ONE MORNING I MEANDER over much of the Quarter with three research technicians, watching them snatch sticky boards from the tops of ninety-eight lampposts. On each of the traps, termite alate and other insects lay dead, captured in an array of final gestures: legs flung out, wings detached, heads strained forward. This is how they keep track of the alate flights. One of the techs tells a curious little girl that they're collecting bogeymen.

The heat comes up as the morning draws on, my glasses fog, and far away down toward the river, up on the roof of Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop, a man rips apart a roof. The shadows under the galleries are appealing, and I step into one. I watch the street and begin to notice how many points of entry and egress the sidewalks contain. There are innumerable manhole covers, water-meter covers, drain access points, and brass caps marking the presence of termite bait traps. I try to imagine the underground world dug out by the people of New Orleans, especially the vast network of storm-water drains that move great torrents of water out of the city when it rains (and there's no place for the water to go in a city that's below sea level, a good fifteen feet below the Mississippi River at the bottom of Poydras Street). The most noticeable thing about the drive in from the Louis Armstrong International Airport, besides the acres of tombs contained in the Metairie and Greenwood cemeteries, is the massive new pumping station along the side of the road sprouting pipes a car could drive through, each branching into countless smaller pipes, and so on until it's impossible to keep track of where all the pipes go. Where once there were canals there are now streets, and possibly still more buried bones of dead Irishmen. New Orleans contains not just a figurative underground but a real one of unimaginable complexity.

IT IS HARD not to think we were somehow built, or evolved, to disturb and sculpt our surroundings to suit us; if not, we must have lost our way long ago, for disturbance is our art and our main preoccupation. Had we been an equilibratory species when we rose up in Africa, we might never have left. But what explains the essential, peripatetic nature of human life and culture, which through time has developed a train of camp followers of great length- invaders like us, moving in our wake like gulls behind a shrimp boat. Whatever the reason, man has traveled the world, and continues to travel the world at ever increasing speeds. Was the arrival of the mosquito Aedes aegypti, a foreign invader thought to have traveled aboard slave ships, divine punishment for our mortal sin and meted out in periodic epidemics of yellow fever and dengue in New Orleans and elsewhere? This is a tempting explanation, but inevitability is more likely the answer. If it hadn't been a slave ship, it would have been a collector of mosquitoes, or stowaways in an around-the-world sailing race, or a wet corner of an oil tanker. Inevitability may itself be divine, but what does it matter?

Those that follow behind us are our pests, and we call them pests because we believe they are the disturbers. We willfully ignore that we are ourselves berserkers, preferring to believe in an illusory equilibrium of national "characters," of cities with "personalities," of sports teams with "destinies," of individuals subsumed in a fantasy of a collective mind that is so very much more comforting than the truth of our essential alienation. This is what Marais knew, and it is what drove him to the "group soul" of the termites. The Norway rat and the Yellow Fever mosquito and the Formosan termite remind us of our vulnerability, which we, the naked ape, have worked so hard to leave behind.

I'M STANDING on Prytania Street in the Lower Garden District, counting the strands of Mardi Gras beads hanging like a kind of prismatic moss from the trees, marking a trail that winds away from me and over to St. Charles Avenue, one of the main parade venues for the krewes during Mardis Gras. Around the corner the men from the Norwegian Seamen's Church are framing an addition entirely out of concrete and steel, which seems smart to me, now that I see potential termite habitat everywhere. I've been tapping on the walls of the pleasant little guesthouse where I've been staying, shaking the wood stairways just a little and peering behind the walls where the wallboard has peeled away. This is how easily a morbid fascination turns to dread. I've begun to see things.

Ed Bordes, executive director of the New Orleans Mosquito & Termite Control Board, pulls up in his old sedan. I hop in for a driving tour through fifty years of termite history. I am relieved to see him. This is the man universally referred to as a "good" and even "great" man by the scientists I've met so far, even the ones who don't work for him. I'm calmed by him, by his neat, clipped white beard, his sharp nose, his bulbshaped head, his pristine white sneakers, his pressed slacks and white button-down shirt, and his giant glasses. But then he says, "The bottom line is I wouldn't be surprised if the whole United States is infested," and I'm on edge again.

We drive toward the Industrial Canal and then shoot up toward the New Orleans Lakefront Airport on Lake Pontchartrain. Later we'll end up driving through the lakefront neighborhoods, then down through Metairie, then over Claiborne Avenue, and eventually to Algiers, ending up finally at his house up by the lake again, having waved at the French Quarter in passing. The experience is very much like riding through the skirmish sites on a battlefield.

The first Formosan termites likely arrived sometime shortly after World War II, when all the equipment and matériel that had been shipped to the Pacific theater made its way back to the United States. New Orleans was busy with military traffic, as it had been since the opening of the war. It's an educated guess that the termites arrived at that time, based on where the insect is native, what ships were moving between there and New Orleans, and where the earliest and most virulent infestations were first identified. Taken together, everything points to the shipyards along the Industrial Canal and the military installations on Lake Pontchartrain and on the Algiers side of the Mississippi. After the war these outfits began to get engines and other equipment back from the Far East, loaded in the Philippines or Taiwan or Japan in wooden boxes, stacked on wooden pallets, and shored by tons of wood dunnage. Up on the lake, where the Army had built Camp Leroy Johnson on filled land of just the right composition and looseness preferred by subterranean termites, the soldiers unloaded boxes of forward-deployed gear from countries where the Formosan had been living for hundreds, if not millions, of years. Down on the river in Algiers, across from the French Quarter, the Algiers Naval Station was crowded with ship after ship waiting their turn to rid themselves of cargo.

The New Orleanians who repeatedly described for me the short natural history of the city's newest termite did so in equal parts fascination, horror, and pride. The pride was for the wartime effort, and in their recitation of the termite story it was often possible to detect a sense of continuity, as if the plague of termites was a part of the sacrifice, a wound the city sustained for the greater good.

But the French Quarter cannot be allowed to suffer that wound. New Orleans is no longer the important port it once was, and it is no longer a center of the American oil industry. Many of the tall buildings in the Central Business District are hotels now, no longer offices for oil companies. The tourism industry, with the French Quarter at its center, is now the city's second-biggest employer and keeps growing as the oil-industry jobs leach away. It is authenticity, more than liquor and strippers and music and voodoo, that is the French Quarter's irreplaceable commodity, and which must not be devoured.

And what of the rest of the city? Bordes tells me the termite is changing the city almost as dramatically as fire. "What happens to poor people? That doesn't work out." We drive along Claiborne Avenue into the tough lower Ninth Ward, once a 1,500-year-old cypress swamp. Whether the poorest neighborhoods of the city will be protected from the termite, Bordes says, will be a matter of will.

By the time certainty dawns, the mating pair of C. formosanus has already survived a months-long ocean crossing from the Philippines in a nuptial chamber gnawed from stray wood. They've already been unloaded from the ship. Fifty years later you're drinking beers at a neighborhood pub in the Irish Channel with a professional shyster and a goth stripper from Baton Rouge, listening to her explain the technical aspects of exorcisms, and all the while you're wondering if the floor will soon collapse in a shower of wood splinters and carton nests.

Ghosts, I learn from the goth, who appeased the dead family haunting her club on Bourbon Street by means of gifts and tough love, just don't want to be alone. They need people.

IN 1966, Ed King was a master's degree student in entomology. That year, Coptotermes formosanus had been discovered both in New Orleans and also out along a stretch of the Calcasieu River near Lake Charles, almost two hundred miles away from New Orleans by interstate. The discovery of these termites occurred almost simultaneously with discoveries in Houston (1965, eradicated; rediscovered 1966), Galveston (1966), and Charleston (1967). Every one of the newly infested cities hosted ports or airbases that received war matériel back from the Pacific theater years before.

King was "young and foolish enough" to sign up for the kind of early work demanded by an encounter with a new species, the kind of very basic essential fieldwork that asks, What are you and what do you want? Decades later, scientists studying C. formosanus work up gene sequences through polymerase chain reactions, but in 1966 what a young scientist like King most needed was a shovel.

King's first Formosan paper, published in 1968, described the 1.4-acre maze of termite galleries-tunnels fortified by carton material-that radiated from the dead stump of a bald cypress next to the Calcasieu River, two miles from the town of Lake Charles. King and his colleagues set about digging around the stump where they'd found a colony and then tracking each of the hundreds of galleries that branched from it, chasing each of them with a shovel, and then a trowel, and then scraping the final layer of soil and the top of the tunnel away with a surgeon's scalpel. In this way he mapped a significant portion of the termite galleries, along the way encountering the engineering feats of the termites: their ability to maintain steady levels of humidity by digging some vertical tunnels in strategic places and capping off others; the inherent strength of their elliptical galleries; their success at building cemented sand lattices across the ceilings like rafters ; and, finally, the sheer complexity of the colony's byways and the dense labyrinthine carton nest of the main colony, the size of a medicine ball once excavated.

Having studied the voracious invader, why didn't King or anyone else raise the alarm? It was the chemicals, King explains. At the time, pest control was largely a matter of picking out which organochlorine would be most effective: DDT, heptachlor, mirex, chlordecone, and the preferred chemical for termites, chlordane. In 1968 these chemicals had begun to gain a bad reputation, and not only because of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, but it was still a long time before they were all banned. Chlordane wasn't banned for all uses, including structural pest control, until 1988, but it's clear that people used existing supplies years after the ban. For the homeowner the two things that distinguished chlordane as a pesticide was that it would stay active in the ground for fifteen to twenty years after treatment and that it killed insects on contact. Chlordane and its relatives could be injected into the ground around the house to create a poisonous moat not fordable by termites. The chemical killed some of the termites, but its most common effect was to repel them. After that, it didn't much matter where the termites went, so long as they didn't get into the house.

But the termites didn't go away, they just went elsewhere. For decades in New Orleans they grew, split off, migrated, and grew some more, until there were many millions, so many that they could never be rousted out of the city. All of this took place out of sight. They found refuge in the city's trees and power poles, in the cross ties along the rail tracks that encircle and divide the city, and in neighborhoods where expensive pest control was the least of one's worries. Researchers at LSU kept an eye on the problem and continued to study the termite throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but as long as there were effective, lethal chemicals available, the Formosan didn't concern many outside the small termitology community. In fact, it's questionable whether anyone, even the scientists who knew the termite well, could have predicted that the termite would invade the rest of the city so successfully once the chlordane ran out. They're mysterious, people said to me in explanation. It's hard to know what they're doing.

In this case, the use of organochlorines against termites-native and foreign alike-was something like channeling the course of a river. The water never ceased, it had to go somewhere, and when the dikes, seawalls, levees, and locks finally failed, the effect of releasing the water's long-contained energy was catastrophic.

"You're trained as a scientist to deal with nothing but the facts," said King, who is now the director of the Agricultural Research Service's Mid-South Area, with responsibility for, among many other things, the French Quarter project. "Speculation is not encouraged, particularly as a graduate student. You don't have a foundation to sponsor a visioning session. I had put forth the hypothesis that the capability was there for this termite to spread as far north as Monroe, Louisiana, but I thought because of the cold temperatures north of there, it wouldn't survive. I don't think that's the case anymore. And as far as saying, 'Watch out, we're fixing to be infested, and the French Quarter and all the trees are in danger, and the [termiteinfested] railroad ties are spreading across the South,' I didn't do it. I didn't see it."

In 1971, King couldn't find a job studying C. formosanus, so he moved on to other projects, other work. "You put your money where the biggest problems are, and because we had outstanding chemicals, it was not viewed as a big problem."

IN 1967 the state of Louisiana banned the movement of wood and wood products out of areas infested by C. formosanus, a quarantine that in theory would regulate the shipment of railroad ties, which scientists believe are largely responsible for the spread of the Formosan around the Southeast. Railroad ties aren't regulated, though, because the spectacularly unsuccessful quarantine was abandoned in 1990. I found one office in New Orleans, a branch of a national company, that specializes in reclaiming railroad materials and brokering their sale around the country. They classify their railroad ties by quality but will still sell ties described this way: A fair to poor quality tie for landscaping uses with a minimum of one good solid side. Rot, plate cutting and end splitting permissible. "Rot" is one of those common words that stand in for any violence done to wood by mysterious forces emerging from the dank and the dark, including moulds and fungii and termites. To say that a railroad tie has been rotted is maddeningly unspecific, especially when those ties come from New Orleans. Railroad ties lend raw, natural beauty to any landscaping project, the company offers.

Raw, natural beauty. If we live in a settled area of the United States, we can look out our windows and see what appears to be evidence of the natural world. There are trees, and birds, and green things growing, and yet for most of us it's virtually impossible to imagine the original landscape before the streets, and the houses, and the importation of thousands of foreign ornamental plants. What we see out our windows is usually a simulacrum of the natural world, this one shaped and in some cases invented by man. There are 50,000 foreign species in North America, and 400 of the 958 species on the Endangered Species List are threatened because of invasions by foreigners. Outside my window, in the woods around my small-town cottage, I see English ivy, kudzu, Japanese honeysuckle, bamboo grass, and some stands of silk tree-all foreign invaders, all introduced by man. The English sparrows and the house finches that dominate the other birds at my feeder are both foreign to this place-one from England, the other from the Western United States. I suppose a railroad tie infested with Formosans is as raw and as natural as most anything else, relatively speaking.

THE NIGHT I SEE the big swarm begins in a little neighborhood joint in the Marigny that triples as a café, bar, and grocery store. I watch the television with some locals from the neighborhood while having a beer. On the television they're showing a martialarts competition involving the breaking of various building materials. The men on either side of me turn out to be experts in construction, and we spend the better part of an hour exploring the various ways the concrete blocks, pieces of wood, bats, and metal pipes could be fashioned to make them brittle under the force of the chops, forearm shivers, and elbow hammers dealt by the crew of tattooed, roaring men and women on the screen.

A tall, muscular Indian named Gary tells me about his time working on a project to determine the strengths of various building materials, including steel. He becomes animated describing the beautiful way a rod of steel will stretch into an hourglass shape, thread thin, before suddenly ballooning at the thinnest spot and snapping with a pop. I tell him about a pair of termites that built a colony on the top floor of one of city's tallest buildings, a hotel, but that doesn't interest him much. We both agree that it's a little funny watching people make sport of breaking wood and concrete. You can make a sport of anything, Gary says.

When I look out the window I realize that the conditions are perfect for a swarm. It's humid but not raining, there's no wind, it's still kind of warm, and the sun is going down. I leave to drive by the various spots I know the scientists will be waiting. I drive by Matt Messenger and Aaron Mullins at the corner of St. Peter and Decatur sitting in folding chairs beside the old live oak glowing beneath the JAX Brewery sign. They're just talking, and Matt has his hands behind his head.

I drive up and down the French Quarter in my car, slowly rolling my way through throngs of visitors walking in the streets. I see some alates here and there. I drive down Decatur again, and there's a pretty good cloud of alates at the streetlamp across from Jackson Square. But I've seen bigger. I turn back up toward the lake, go right down Burgundy, then right again down Gov. Nicholls, until I encounter the largest swarm I've ever seen. It's 8:10 P.M. at the corner of Chartres and Gov. Nicholls. The alates are clouding a streetlamp and falling all over one another, tumbling in little airy eddies down onto the car below before taking wing again and going for the light. I get out of my car and feel the alates landing on me, scrabbling along my neck and in my hair. I watch them searching for each other. I take pictures. A man passes by, pushing his belly ahead of him. "Are those termites?" he asks. "Yes," I say. Another woman comes striding down the sidewalk, sees me covered in termites, and crosses the street. I can't see where they're coming from precisely, but it appears they could be coming over the wall that borders the sidewalk and guards a deep courtyard and some very old trees. I stand watching for a while, then I brush the termites off and get back into the car.

I almost head home, but then I decide to drive out of the Quarter, a place I'm suddenly tired of thinking about. I drive out to Canal and take a right headed away from the river. On my left is the median of the big boulevard, which I remind myself is called neutral ground by locals, a holdover from the time when Canal was the divide between the French and American sections of the city, back when the French were the city and everybody else was anarriviste, an unwelcome invader.

Farther along Canal I start to see larger clouds of alates flitting in the light of the tall lamps arrayed on the neutral ground. I drive up to Rampart, which marks the northern border of the Quarter, and turn right. Off to my left I see a monstrous, pulsating swarm and realize what I'd seen back in the Quarter was only a minor eruption.

They appear in the sky below the very tall streetlamps as a long, kinetic cloud of white. Alates fly to the light from both sides of the street to join one another. They come from the stores on my right, from the Iberville housing project on my left, from all over. I've never seen anything like it, which I suppose is a testament to the ingenuity of the scientists and their partners. Instead of congratulating them, I want to rush back to the oak under the JAX Brewery sign and tell Matt and Aaron that the termites are everywhere, but I know that they already know this.

I can't stop my car very easily, so I end up driving around Rampart and over to Armstrong Park and back again, over and over, watching the swarm expand. I follow clouds of flying insects into Tremé, one of the nation's oldest historically black neighborhoods, and I find that I am driving on Marais Street, a coincidence so stupendous I begin yammering to myself and scribbling notes on the back of my hand as I drive. I realize I'm driving dangerously, so I pull over under a power line that crosses the street and watch a skinny rat run along the wire from one side of the street to the other. Two little girls from the neighborhood walk past me on the sidewalk, each gently picking termites out of the other's hair.

Finally, I go to my room and pull out Marais's little book to read its odd ending again. He had spent years on the veld observing termites, but never once had he seen a queen in her chamber. He'd finished publishing his little articles on termites when he was called to Pretoria to see a house completely infested and realized he had been handed a rare opportunity. He struck a deal with the workmen tearing apart the house in search of the queen: he would point out the "palace cavity" to the workmen only if they let him watch the queen, unmolested, for two to three days. They agreed, and finally Marais had his chance to observe the brain of the compound organism, the termitary, which was blessed with a group soul and not with the almost unbearable burden of individual consciousness, which was man's, and certainly Marais's, curse.

He saw much more than he ever expected to see. He came to understand things he had not understood, and certain mysteries were revealed to him that he had not known existed. Then he watched as a piece of clay dislodged by the excavations fell and hit the queen, causing her to move her head back and forth in a strange way. The workers who had been tending her began wandering aimlessly, and elsewhere in the colony all work ceased. Then her bodyguards disappeared and a rush of workers set upon her and began to suck the fluid from her, devouring her body. Even her king joined in the feast. Soon she was emptied, her skin "hanging in loose folds," but she was not dead.

They turned on her perhaps out of confusion, a disruption in the linkage that formed what Marais called the soul and what scientists today would describe as an elaborate system of chemical communication. Perhaps. But as quickly as they turned on her, they stopped and began to nurture her back to health. The next day, the colony went about its business as if nothing had happened. It was a wonderful and puzzling event, and as it is with all moments of wonder, it couldn't last long. "And that was the end of our observations. The workmen had occupied themselves with excavating and removing the breeding gardens in other rooms, but now the time allotted to us had come to an end. The queen was removed from her half-cell and taken away captive; and after that the activities and life of this nest ceased for good."

It was just one queen. There were others; there had always been others, and there will always be more. It's silly if not impossible to grieve for a termite. Grief is for other things, things that don't persist.

Copyright © 2005 Duncan Murrell