If you live in the Northeast US or Eastern Canada, you probably should be. If you do gardening or landscaping or other outdoors work or handle firewood, please find out about this nasty little critter and learn how to recognize it.
It’s a patent-leather-shiny black beetle, around an inch long (give or take half an inch; 19-36 mm), with white spots that look like chipped paint, and long white/black striped antennae. Kind of elegant, really; SF geeks might think of Mark’s favorite butter bug design in A Civil Campaign (just with patches instead of racing stripes).
Why to be worried: this invasive species is a wood borer that kills hardwoods. It is the Ridley Scott Alien of trees. It especially likes maples. It spreads fast. The recommended method for controlling it? Cut down and burn any tree that’s infested. Both the US and Canada have policies aiming for total eradication – both because they think they should, and because they think they can.
Originally from China, it came to NYC sometime before 1996 and (probably separately) the Chicago area by 1998, then spread from those places. It got to Toronto by 2003. It was just found in Massachusetts last week. A county extension agent friend of ours from New Hampshire is very, very worried.
Fret! Spread panic! Take precautions! Well, or at least report it if you see one.
We’ve lost a lot of trees in Chicago from this bug. Some neighborhoods that used to have tree arbors over the street for dozens of square blocks lost almost all of them.
Is this bug related to the Emerald Ash Borer we get warnings about? Though I do hear more warnings on Detroit radio…they seem better about spreading the word…we have a few signs…
Not very related in biological family terms, but very similar in impact. They are both originally Asian wood-boring beetles, introduced to the US through imported wood, now dangerously invasive. The big difference is that while the EAB sticks to ash trees, the ALB will eat many different hardwoods; it just likes maples best. It’ll also eat
Apparently it doesn’t care for oaks.
In Detroit, you may not have cause to worry about ALB yet – for the time being, Chicago seems to have contained the little f***ers. New York and New England are the problem areas right now. Feel free to continue worrying about EAB, though.
Summit County Colorado has lost nearly half of its trees due to Mountain Pine Beetle. The dry dead trees are a real problem. Fire will be next. It’s a cycle that will almost certainly happen.
Wisconsin just took a hit with the Emerald ash bore. That’s about 30% of our trees. the counties are under quarantine, but the federal plans they announced last year, amount to cut all ash trees in a hundred miles of infestations.
Add in a cut all maple trees order and I think you can call us hilly Kansas. The price of cheap China imports. They don’t check shipping pallets and the like for pests that will devastate our ecosystem.
I see that Florida is trying to count pythons in the Everglades, and they estimate about 30,000 of them right now.
My reaction to that probably wasn’t supposed to be “Cool.”
More seriously: there’s widespread subway advertising about this in New York, as ecological agencies are making finding this thing a big priority and asking people to report any sightings.
