Insects and Slugs

My interest in insects goes back to my childhood and for a Cub badge I did an assignment on pond life and drew many pond insects copying a book I had. Actually, I still have that book (albeit thumb-marked) and I have my assignment tucked away somewhere. Oh yes and I still like tadpoles & frogs!
As expected, I became interested in the insects I encountered in Tanzania and took note of them. Chameleons too! There is more to tell about insects, chameleons and frogs once we moved to Makumira; but first : Sanawari.

In New Zealand, cockroaches are around 1cm long and we never saw them at our home, so I was indeed surprised when one skittered across the floor in out house at Sanawari! The thing was as large as a mouse! At least 3cm long. I reached for my trusty fly-swat and was again surprised when it 'outran' me and it flew! I realised early on that big insects can fly in tropical areas because they do not burn up energy keeping warm. Of course the other thing about cockroaches is they they are dirty buggers! So when you see them, you kill them! Sometimes it is not that easy but there was a aerosol product called appropriately 'Doom' - made in Australia, which proved good to combat such pests; but the name made me cautious and I used it sparingly.

One day Baraka decided to burn the accumulated rubbish at the cow enclosure behind our house. It was mainly uneaten maize stalks/banana tree material and a good amount of cow droppings/urine. Well the stink! It lasted for days and the smoke wafted through the house!

We had been collecting beer cans to be used as irrigation containers/mini-reservoirs for our planting projects (somewhere we have a delightful photo of beer cans on a school desk with students listening to my explanation of their use - the pic could have a variety of captions!) Most of them came from a German missionary :-) They were stored in cartons and kept in a back room.

Baraka's fire dislodged the families of cockroaches and many of them sought asylum in out house and more particularly in those beer cans. Of course the could crawl in but they were unable to crawl out! They made their entrance in the night and we were woken by the incessant scratching of a million legs on aluminium! My only course of action was to toss the cartons of beer cans outside into the night!

I had bought some timber and manufactured a set of shelves - much like a bookcase - to stand such things as our tooth brushes, hand soap, shampoo on in our bathroom. One night I happened to go in there with a torch (because there was a power cut) and I spotted a cockroach nibbling on my toothbrush! Next morning I thought it appropriate to have a look at the space between the wall and the shelves, and not surprisingly, there was mama & baba cockroach together with a dozen or so kids! We realised they must have liked their diet of toothpaste and soap and any morsels of food stuck to the bristles of the toothbrushes! I had the 'Doom' can ready and it was Armageddon for that particular family! After that we kept our toothbrushes covered!

The Swahili name for snail is 'konokono' and it is the same word for slug.

Slugs were not welcome in the tree nursery. The did eat some of the foliage, but worse, they damaged some of the seed. Particularly Acacia seed, we would nip the end off the very hard seed coat to allow moisture into the embryo and encourage germination. These slugs would latch onto the damaged part of the seed and suck all the goodness out. These slugs were 10cm long and fat! I you get the slime on your clothes, it is almost impossible to wash it off.

Each morning I would go out to the nursery and kill the slugs! It was not only the big ones, the smaller ones were more numerous! And I had my allies! Siafu! Safari Ants!

Watching Safari Ants is an interesting pastime, reminding me of 'Star Wars'! They are organised and well structured in their behaviour! Again I will write more about them later.

I would kill maybe 40 small slugs each morning and 4, 5 0r 6 large ones. My method was to cut them in half with a sharp pocket knife! Then I would feed them to the Safari Ants! They were not always travelling through in their column, but always there were one or two 'scouting'. Place a piece of slug by one of the scouts, and she (yes a worker) would check it out and go to bring her mates back to cut up and carry their prey back to camp. It truly is fascinating at watch them break up even the large slugs and carry them away. This may involve a team effort to lift the larger pieces.

Siafu are very defensive and will bite! Once one managed to climb my leg and in the confines of my underpants began to defend itself! I was in the middle of an environmental seminar, so had to excuse myself and find some privacy before I could relieve the pain!