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.
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