Carcoma Alert (when the munching stops!)
August 2006 - Andalucia
'Why', asked our visitor as tactfully as possible, 'have you got bits of masking tape stuck randomly over those lovely beams?'. Visitor was doubtless wondering if it was yet another of our Fruitbatty eccentricities. They understood better later on when we were eating supper and it became apparent that we were not the only creatures in the house doing the munching. It's very disconcerting, however many times you hear it - that ghastly crunch-crunch as the Carcoma, wood beetle, larva feast on the starch and cellulose in any plank, beam or bit of furniture they can get into. Our large ceiling beams, on which they were dining, must be the Carcoma equivalent of a never-ending buffet table.
The ceilings in the house in which we're living were supposedly given anti-parasite treatment when the property was renovated some four or five years ago. During the time we've been in residence, the increasingly high-decibel crunching and showers of fine sawdust below cast some doubt of the thoroughness of that treatment. We spent goodly portions of the winter and spring leaping around the furniture with the anti-Carcoma spray, sticking the long nozzle in the holes, blasting the beasts, then making the goofy little patterns with masking tape as we covered the holes to stop the noxious substance dribbling out. The advice actually is to fill the holes with wax or wood-filler plugs - and of course we always intended to go back and do that, but somehow it's another job that hasn't got done.
Despite our furniture-athletics and the purchase of several large cans of spray, we've continued to share our home with these voracious feeders. Living in the Spanish campo (countryside) as we do at the moment, we're quite prepared to share our domestic space (within reason) with a few gecko, the occasional mouse and a medley of fascinating spiders, but there is a limit to our tolerance. It all got rather demoralising at one stage - no sooner had we zapped a couple of holes that had the tell-tale new wood appearance (and came with their own pile of sawdust on the floor/sofa/bed underneath), than another blighter (or several?) would start up somewhere else. In the wee small hours, doing a bit of insomniacal reading or watching a late-night video, it sounded less like a larva or two above our heads, than a family of beavers preparing wood for a dam. Horrible. The beams are alive, to paraphrase the song, with the sound of munching ...
These particular beams are decorative rather than structural, so at least we don't have to get overly concerned about the integrity of the whole ceiling. Nonetheless, they're pretty hefty bits of tree and we're not that keen to have any of them come down on our heads. We began to think we were going to have to contact the house owners and suggest they considered more radical measures. Then … then the munching stopped. Had we just tuned it out? No, no - the two places in the kitchen which, despite numerous attempts with the long, thin nozzle, had continued to resonate to the sound of chewing, had definitely gone quiet. Phew. Or was it really a cause for relief? Of course any of you who have been at the mercy of the life-cycle of the Carcoma Grande will know that the silence merely heralded the start of further horror.
The first one I noticed was when I briskly swept the kitchen floor one day - the usual collection of fluff, the ubiquitous dust, a couple of slivers of cheese rind, a slice of desiccated aubergine and … a creature with antennae nearly twice as long as its body. Initially I had my usual reaction - oh, I don't want to kill anything unnecessarily. Then the ghastly truth dawned. I rushed for the can of 'Carcomin' spray to compare the picture with the ten centimetre long beast I had in my dustpan. There was no doubt. It was the antennae that gave it away. Monstrous.
After that came the rapid development of the patent Carcoma-Catcher-Plus (the bottom half of an empty mineral water bottle and a piece of cardboard with which to flick the beasts into said receptacle, and also create a lid until it could be rushed to the execution chamber. It was only after the second one escaped we realised how quickly they learn to fly). Subsequently this was replaced by the Carcoma-Catcher-Deluxe-Mark-2 which involved the addition of water in the bottle-bottom, for rapid drowning, and an old knife for winkling the beetles out of the crevices from which they were emerging. At the height of the season, we were harvesting four or five a day as the heat of August helped the larvae-turned-chrysalises to hatch into the adult form.
Key to the process seems to be to catch them quickly, since the literature tells us with great understatement that the females 'tienen la molesta costumbre de poner los huevecillos en las grietas y agujeros de la madera' - have the annoying habit of putting their little eggs in the cracks and holes in the wood. Yes, pretty annoying habit, I'd say. Once those little egglettes get laid, small but voracious larvae emerge and make their way into the veins of the wood, where they make long 'galerías' for their extended munch-fest.
And a very apt name they've been given too - the verb 'comer' in Spanish is 'to eat', so it's a small add-on to the verb to make 'carcomer' - to eat away. That's precisely what they are destined to do for their entire lives - from egglette, to larva, to chrysalis, to adult Carcoma. Automatic Spanish-to-English translations of any website pages about Carcoma reinforce their life-purpose by always calling them 'Eats Away It'! Even more worryingly, they don't just eats-away-it at woodwork - we learn that they can cross over into plaster and even soft metals like lead if they run out of their preferred meal of wood.
Our Spanish neighbours come up with a range of solutions in addition to death by the long nozzle of the Carcomin spray. Soaking and/or spraying the beams with petrol and diesel are hot favourites, although some still say that the good old stand-by lime wash can't be beaten (which means eschewing the current fashion for dark stained beams). The one that tempts us most is a more natural approach, and, we're told, really works. Since all the potential remedies are pretty smelly - and many horribly toxic - can it really be any worse to rub all the beams, every day for several days, with a nice strong onion?
Jeni y Dave y Chip
August 2006