Emerald Ash Borer

[AJE]

A Buggy Solution to the Emerald Ash Borer?

WBAY-TV
June 15, 2007
By Jenn Karlman

An insect killing thousands of trees across the Midwest isn't known to be in Wisconsin yet, but the State is preparing for it. The little green metallic bug has the potential to wipe out thousands of ash trees.

One option is using bugs to fight the bugs.

If the emerald ash borer shows up in Wisconsin, the Department of Natural Resources says the State is considering bringing in Chinese wasps to essentially eat away at the problem.

"The wasp would find those eggs and attack them and lay its own egg inside," the DNR's Bill McNee explained. "The wasp larva would eat the ash borer from the inside, therefore, no ash borer."


But "no ash borer" doesn't necessarily mean no backlash.

"It may have adverse consequences on populations of native species which could then have other eco-system consequences which we can't really predict," entomologist Michael Draney cautioned.

"There are always risks with bringing in new species, and one of the things we do now that we didn't do many years ago, there's extensive testing done to see what other species an insect will hack," McNee said.

Bringing in bugs from a different country to battle a bug already here is called biological control. It's what scientists did 15 years ago with the gypsy moth. The Japanese wasp killed nearly half of the moth eggs.


"Maybe one out of a thousand eggs it attacks will be something other than gypsy moth, so that's the kind of specificity we're looking for these biological controls that are introduced these days," McNee said.

And one of those could be the Chinese wasp, should the emerald ash borer cross state lines.

http://www.wbay.com/Global/story.asp?S=6666052

[AJE]

Ash borer fight adds wasps


U.S. wants to unleash Asian beetle's parasitic predator to save trees
Chess or checkmate?

June 9, 2007
The federal government has spent more than $100 million in the last five years in its fight to stop the tree-eating emerald ash borer. The battle plan has been as simple as it has been ineffective - stop the beetle's ability to spread by destroying nearby stands of healthy ash trees.

The problem, basically, is that the flying, stealthy little critter has been infesting trees faster than the government can chop them down.

Now the U.S. Department of Agriculture is poised to launch a new front in the battle.

It wants to release three species of imported Chinese wasps this summer to eat the invading beetles, which already have been blamed for the death of 20 million ash trees in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana.


For the complete articleby JS Online :arrow:
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=617306

[kmfarm]

Seems like everytime we bring in a new bug to fight another, we compound the issue. The fed's and the DNR need to make sure that these wasp's don't cause another problem later. If the wasp's happen to control the borer population, what do they do then? Go away, or attack something else?

Mark