A Race to Save a Signature American Tree from a Deadly Disease
nytimes.comEmerald ash borer got all the ash trees on my wooded property a few years ago. Pretty amazing to watch that happen in real time.
Can ash splints still be made from the trees they infest? Do you burn the trees? Very curious to hear more about your experience
Right now they are just standing dead. I need to do something about that soon.
I love working with ash. You can do a lot with it if you turn it into lumber before it rots.
A basket maker might see an exchange beneficially. Splints are a great resource. I suspect the outer splints to be a little worse for wear.
I didn't know what an ash splint was. I'd guess they are best obtained from a live-cut tree that is still "green"? Mine would all be pretty dry by now.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
A different one, but the spotted lanternfly finally found my grapes. I'm at a total loss for how to protect them. The local university is studying oils and sprays, but they don't have any guidance yet.
The wheel bug is the first predator to realize the lantern fly is a tasty morsel. I hope we can continue coaching other insects to eat the invasives.
In my area we've had the Spotted lanternfly for more than 5 years now, maybe closer to 10. In the first year or two they could be seen in huge numbers. Since then they've waned off considerably. Like last year I don't recall seeing many at all. This summer they are back but still nothing compared to that initial wave. I've seen birds eating them, leaving lots of disembodied red wings in my backyard. Feels like they will reach some equilibrium stable population.
I hope your grapes make it through
From wikipeda, it sounds like wasps are a natural predator. Not sure which native wasps might go for them or how to encourage that.
Chickens would probably eat them but they might eat your grapes as well.
An insect hotel tailored to the native wasps' nesting behavior would probably work best for attracting them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect_hotel
They usually just stand there. There are too many to easily take down, and are mixed in with other trees.
The whole east half of the continental US is one large storm away from thousands of fallen dead trees.
Might be off by a few orders of magnitude there. Even 10,000 trees would represent 0.006% of the trees in my state. (Hint: it's the smallest one.)
There are estimates that 13-25% of tree growth in our state has died over the last decade. That's closer to 50 million.
Even a moderately strong storm (only two warning sirens) took down thousands if not tens of thousands of living trees near me.
Weirdly, dead trees can survive better because without leaves they don’t catch as much wind.
I've also recently learned about Sudden Oak Death, a fungus which is ravaging forests in California and Oregon. Evidently it is unknown where it came from.
It's really wild. I wonder what trees we'll have left!
Besides the famous case of the chestnut:
Dogwoods are being wiped out, mostly gone in some areas, disease originating from Asia: https://henderson.ces.ncsu.edu/2021/03/native-dogwoods-long-...
Sassafras trees wiped out by Asian beetle causing laurel wilt: https://www.lsuagcenter.com/articles/page1685633928383
American elms largely wiped out by Dutch elm disease (also actually originates from Asia) https://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/terrestrial/pathogens-an...
Others in this thread have talked about the threats to ash. It's very disheartening, but I guess it's the inevitable price of globalization.
Chestnut is being rescued by a two-pronged approach using hybridization (with a resistant asian species, followed by backcrosses to get something that is mostly American Chestnut) and genetic engineering (introducing a wheat gene that destroys oxalate, which the fungus uses to kill tissue.)
I wonder, does Asia and Europe have nearly as many problems with North American invasive plants / pests / diseases as North America does with its non-natives?
Being from the US, I don't recall any such stories in the news.
Oh we do! There's a nice statistic fron the Netherlands about the number of invasive species, which is exponentially growing: https://www.clo.nl/en/indicators/en162202-alien-species-in-t...
Most of these are from Asia and Noth America.
DEA will be delighted about that second one.
Seems like there is a disease for pretty much every American tree, before long all we'll have is maples and random non-natives.
They (the European version at least) also have a symbiotic relationship with Trumpet of the Dead. There's an ancient forest near me with beach trees and you find the black trumpets in areas where there's several very old and giant beach trees in proximity.
Good grief, another one?
Welcome to the Homogenocene, where ecosystems across the world are irreversibly mixed. All those species that depended on isolation? Sorry Charlie.
I was watching Star Wars recently and a little voice in the back of my head kept freaking out about the lack of biosecurity -- "sure let's just tromp directly from this planet to another one without even changing our shoes!"
I'm guessing by the time of these stories the ecosystems have already been hopelessly corrupted. This could be especially catastrophic when some alien biochemistry that uses (say) dioxins as building blocks gets introduced. It makes all the "let's blow up planets" more understandable, I suppose.