By: Kim Honey
Toronto -- When her youngest daughter turned 3, Lina Liscio started stocking the trousseau. All the things Rosemary might possibly need to begin married life -- linens, silverware, even $150 pillows -- were bought with love and carefully packed away in cardboard boxes.
Over the next 20 years, the boxes stored in the basement multiplied: There were almost 40 last fall when Mrs. Liscio, who owns a bakery, and her husband Tony, a Toronto Transit Commission employee, started making some tough decisions about retirement.
"I don't want to move, I'm too old," Mrs. Liscio told her spouse.
They decided to build their dream house within the walls of the semi-detached house in North York where they had raised two girls.
Last October, they got around to the basement where Rosemary's treasures were stowed.
"When my husband went to move the boxes, they were eaten. Everything was eaten," said Mrs. Liscio. "My husband put his glasses on and he saw all these animals jumping, and that's when he called me."
The critters had chomped through the cardboard and devoured anything made of plant fibre. That included sheets, a wooden frame that held a glass salad bowl and the handles from a set of pots.
Mrs. Liscio called in an exterminator, who delivered the bad news. "He comes back to my store and says, `I don't know how to tell you this: You have termites.'
"You feel like a big, big knife has gone through you. For someone who talks a lot, I was speechless. My husband walked around with tears in his eyes and asked, `Why?' For us, it is a tragedy."
Welcome to a nightmare that is shared by thousands of homeowners in the Toronto area. Termites, first discovered in Toronto 60 years ago, now terrorize property owners from Oakville in the west to Whitby in the east and as far north as Newmarket.
They have hitched rides in compost, on plants, in firewood to all the former municipalities that now make up the megacity: North York, York, East York, Etobicoke and Scarborough.
Now the staff of the new city's housing department are trying to determine just how far Toronto should go to protect residents against the insidious insect.
House insurance won't cover the $1,400 cost of soil treatment, let alone repairs that can reach $20,000.
Only the former City of Toronto has a program that helps homeowners pay for the cost of conventional soil treatment, but that just keeps the termites at bay. And only Toronto and York gave money last year to a research project that has been successful in slaying the beasts.
According to Tim Myles, an urban entomologist at the University of Toronto who is conducting the research, whenever termites eat the timbers of a house they also take a bite out of the city's main source of revenue.
"This is something that is devaluating the property-tax base of the city. This is what the tax base is based on, the value of the housing stock."
Reticulitermes flavipes, or the eastern subterranean termite, survives in the wilds by feeding on morsels of dead wood, but the city is a veritable smorgasbord.
"It's a bonanza," Dr. Myles said. "A house is a whole bunch of boards in a fantastic agglomeration that is already cut into pieces, it provides hidden wall boards, often times provides dank situations, high humidity, darkness. So this is no problem adapting to the urban environment. This is made to order."
Dead wood may be a termite's favourite food, but it has also been known to munch through some strange things, including phone cables and even lead. The bugs love to burrow in polystyrene insulation, even though it has no nutritive value.
"They're sort of nervous gnawers," said Dr. Myles, who has been researching termites for nine years at the U of T and describes them as "24-hour-a-day eating machines."
A creamy white creature about five millimetres long, Reticulitermes is native to southern British Columbia, but has been accidentally introduced across the country. It was discovered in a warehouse on Toronto's waterfront in 1938, and by 1995 an estimated 548 blocks representing about 20 per cent of the city's building stock had been treated for termite infestation.
Dr. Myles said conventional control methods have not been able to stem the tide because Reticulitermes doesn't reproduce in the usual way. Primary reproductive pairs, called alates, fly off and mate, becoming the king and the queen of new colonies. But this type of termite also hatches secondary reproducers called nymphoids that stay at home with the folks, are fed by worker termites, and lay a prodigious quantity of eggs.
Just how many houses in the megacity are affected is difficult to gauge because pest-control companies consider their records confidential.
"Once you've got termites, you've got 'em," said Dick Murphy, who has owned and operated Aetna Pest Control Ltd. for 25 years. "They're in the soil and they're not leaving town."
He and other licenced exterminators use chemical-barrier technology to control termites -- the only option available in Canada for the past 50 years. They mix about six litres of insecticide (permethrin or chlorpyrofos) with 1,000 litres of water and inject the solution into holes drilled around the inside and the outside of the foundation.
The idea is to create a toxic envelope around the house that will kill termites that come into contact with it, although the pesticides are broad-spectrum, meaning they kill other insects.
But Dr. Myles, a one-man termite-control show at the University of Toronto's forestry faculty, has been studying a new method called trap-treat-release that uses just a tablespoon of another insecticide, sulfluramid.
The approach stems from the fact that termites have what Dr. Myles calls "social skins" and "social guts." They are fastidious groomers, constantly cleaning mites and spores from one another with their tongues, and they also regurgitate and excrete matter that is eaten by other insects in the colony.
Dr. Myles spent three years developing a quick-drying combination of dye, solvent, resin and pesticide, then started trapping termites in 1993. Once in the lab, they are shaken from containers into a tray, and dabbed with the red solution that turns them into "an agent of death," Dr. Myles explained.
Returned to their colony, they pass the poison along through grooming and feeding. "We found abut 1,400 termites can be killed by one treated termite."
Dr. Myles's treatment hasn't cost a penny for about 850 homeowners who have participated in trials in the past five years because his work has been fully funded -- about $2-million in 11 years -- by the U of T, all three levels of government and businesses.
Conventional termite treatment costs about $1,400, but the damage is much more expensive to repair. In the Liscios' case, $50,000 worth of renovations are in jeopardy because the insects continue to burrow into the house. Then there was the cost of replacing what was gobbled up from the trousseau, not to mention an estimated $1,100 to fix the bit of the piano the termites snacked on when it was stored outside on the patio.
Aetna's Mr. Murphy recounted a recent case in which a client was trying to sell his house but the deal fell through after termites were discovered. The house has no basement, so the owner had to take out the entire main floor. "Now he has got to put his floor back, put his hardwood back, and put his kitchen in. He'll be lucky to get away for under $20,000 and now the sale of the house is gone as well."
The City of Toronto first appointed a termite-control officer in 1962, and then pressed the U of T for an urban entomology program, which was created in 1987. This year, the city set aside $24,000 for homeowners who need help paying for termite treatment; up to $500 is available per house, which means between 48 and 55 buildings are treated a year.
The grant is available only to residents of the old city, but housing department staff were asked last month to report to the new city's executive committee on whether the program should be open to everyone next year.
Dr. Myles, meanwhile, feels he has almost reached the point where his field trials are redundant.
In 1994, his technicians were trapping as many as 600,000 termites a week on one block in the former city of York. The next year, the trap-treat-release method had suppressed termite activity by 95 per cent, and "it has stayed at that level for the past three years," Dr. Myles said.
". . . That's been very satisfying to see, the proof that we've really shown it can be done at the block scale. It's never been done anywhere in the world before."
Now, he asked, "wouldn't it be more efficient to be doing this as a service sort of run out of municipalities?"
This year, supported by $50,000 from the old city of Toronto and $25,000 from York, he got by with two crews rather than the four he had last year when he had $125,000 to monitor old sites for reinfestation and to treat new ones.
"What we're doing now is responding to need; we're responding to the wheel that squeaks," Dr. Myles said. "We're not saying, `Let's have a clear war plan.' We can't. We're just sort of going around and putting a Band-Aid here and a Band-Aid there."
One of the squeakier wheels is Mrs. Liscio. Last week she got inspectors from both Toronto and North York out to her home, and won their support for a community meeting she hopes will lead to a block trial by Dr. Myles. (Before amalgamation, she would have been totally out of luck because North York hasn't contributed to the research in the past four years.)
Dr. Myles has said he will gladly treat Mrs. Liscio's whole neighbourhood in the vicinity of Don Mills Road and McNicoll Avenue, but will need more money. Without it, they can treat only her property.
After the inspection, Mrs. Liscio was told that the root of her problem is the landscaping she and her husband did several years ago.
To eliminate steps into the house, they brought in topsoil, building up the grade of the land so high that earth covered the bottom of some bricks.
Now, according to Arnie Rose, manager of programs and administration in Toronto's shelter, housing and support division, they have two options: remove all the earth touching the walls or put in a trench full of specially graded sand in which termites can't operate.
But the Liscios have already spent $50,000 on renovations and there's a wedding for Rosemary, now 24, on the horizon. Mrs. Liscio said she can't afford the $20,000 the work would cost.
Which is why, if Mayor Mel Lastman ignores the pleas of the megacity's afflicted homeowners, she has a drastic plan for the bucket of termite-ridden soil on display in her backyard.
"I'm going to go to all the big chiefs and I'm going to say, `Okay then, here. I'm going to put it on your lawn.' But after a little while I'm going to ask, `How does it feel. How does it feel?' Because you cannot really know how I feel unless you have the same problem."
TERMITE TRIVIA
The natural habitat of the eastern subterranean termite is a wide band that circles the globe at temperate latitudes, with Canada as its northern limit. The United States, Mexico, Europe, Middle East, northern Africa, India, China, Korea and Japan are also battling the insect.
A soil-temperature inversion in Ontario allows Reticulitermes flavipes to live below ground in winter. The optimum temperature for survival may be between 20 and 25, but they can survive at 5 degrees.
Southern Ontario towns and cities are rife with the things; the rest of the country, with the exception of southern Vancouver Island and the Fraser and Okanagan river valleys, has got off relatively scot-free. Infestations have been reported in Medicine Hat, Alta., and Winnipeg, but Quebec and the Atlantic provinces have been spared because the termite cannot survive their climates.
The termite prefers softwood, such as pine and spruce, as well as faster growing hardwoods, such as silver maple. Each worker eats an estimated 0.08 milligrams of wood a day. A colony of five million would devour 400 grams a day, or 146 kilograms a year -- the equivalent of 40 two-by-fours 8 feet long.
ANATOMY OF AN EATING MACHINE
For Reticulitermes flavipes, life is a constant quest for food.
Colonies can contain 10 million insects and sprawl across an entire city block, with queens who are constantly pregnant, soldiers who must protect the colony from marauding ants, and nymphs, the potential breeders.
So the worker termite has a lot of mouths to feed.
The diet consists of cellulose, a sugar polymer manufactured through photosynthesis, and lignin both derived from the cell walls of dead plants.
A fairly feeble animal, the termite has a strong jaw but no eyes. Its creamy white skin is thin and rather delicate, but the mandibles jutting out of its head are tough enough to tunnel through earth and snip off pieces of wood.
Most of a termite's head is filled with the muscles that open and close its jaw, as well as two sets of teeth. Each bite is passed to the molar plate where it is ground into fibrous fragments.
These bits pass down the esophagus into the crop, a storage area where they are tumbled around and broken down more. Next the gizzard continues the grinding and, once the size is right, feeds the fibres into the midgut en route to the hindgut, or paunch, where symbiotic protozoans live.
These one-celled creatures actually engulf wood fibres and break them down for the termite, which gets it energy and nutrients from both the fibres and dead protozoans. At the same time, bacteria in the hindgut fix atmospheric nitrogen, allowing the termites to manufacture their own amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.
The Malpighian tubules are equivalent to the kidneys and liver, and excrete the waste product, uric acid. The rest of the waste passes through the colon and is excreted through the rectum.
The excrement, a liquid pasty substance, is used like a plaster to seal cracks and fissures in the shelter tubes built by termites when they travel above ground. These tubes, made of dirt transported in termites' mouths, guard against temperature extremes and humidity. They are the most conspicuous sign of termite infestation.
|
