Australasian Hispidae of the Genera Bronthispa and Promecotheca which destroy Coconut Palm Fronds

Extract

With the increasing demand for copra all over the world for the production of coconut oil, the cultivation of coconut palms has increased enormously during the last ten years in the Solomon Islands, New Britain, Papua, Samoa, and the New Hebrides, and large areas of virgin forest have been cleared and planted on regular scientific principles. In olden times most of the nuts were collected from the native plantations, where the palms were grown under almost wild forest conditions, arid were then more hardy and did not suffer to the same extent from insect pests as do the palms planted under modern conditions. It is probable that the increased food supply, represented in the fronds of the thousands of young coconut palms planted out, has been responsible for the enormous increase of a number of indigenous leafeating beetles, which, under the conditions previously prevailing, lived upon the wild coconut and other species of palms growing in the jungle. In addition to many insect pests allied to or identical with those known in Ceylon, India, and the Malay States, we have in these Eastern islands a number of leaf-destroyers in the small flattened beetles belonging to the family Hispidae. The larvae of these beetles feed either on the upper surface, or in the tissue of the leaf under the protection of which they finally pupate, so that one can sometimes obtain the whole life-history from the egg to the perfect insect in a single palm frond. The majority of these leaf beetles, which are causing so much damage in the coconut plantations, belong to the genus Protnecoiheca, Blanchard, and from what we know of the life-history of several species that have become serious pests, it is fairly safe to assume that the habits of all the species are similar.