The Bark Beetle Plague

Yale's Environment 360 recently conducted an interview with Montana entomologist Diana Six. Here's the part that got my attention.

e360 —The scale of the current epidemic is unprecedented. Since the 1990s more than 60 million acres of forest, from northern New Mexico through British Columbia, have suffered die-offs. By the time the outbreak in British Columbia peters out, some 60 percent of the mature pines in the province may be dead. That’s a billion cubic meters of wood. People who have not been to the Rockies lately may not grasp the extent of the tree die-off due to the bark beetle infestation. Could you paint a picture of what is going on there?

Six — It’s pretty amazing. There have been tens of millions of acres of trees killed. If you go north to British Columbia, a really big province, something like 80 percent of the trees are dead. You can get in a plane and fly for literally hours over dead forest. So this is massive. Beetle outbreaks are normal, they have been happening for thousands of years.

But this one is estimated to be more than ten times bigger than any event we know of in the past. And there is no end in sight.

80 percent! Well, OK—in April, 2015, National Geographic said:

The scale of the current epidemic is unprecedented. Since the 1990s more than 60 million acres of forest, from northern New Mexico through British Columbia, have suffered die-offs. By the time the outbreak in British Columbia peters out, some 60 percent of the mature pines in the province may be dead. That’s a billion cubic meters of wood.

60 percent? Maybe it's closer to 80% now. At this level of die-off, what's the difference?

You would think this story would be getting more attention. Check out this map.

Extent of the damage in 2013. Look at British Columbia (B.C.)

Here's Diana Six again.

e360 — What factors have contributed to the current outbreak?

Six — Drought stresses trees, and when trees are stressed, they don’t fight back as much, so it takes a lot fewer beetles to kill them. So you’ve got this perfect storm of more beetles because it’s warmer, and it takes a lot fewer beetles to kill the trees due to recent drought, and that triggers an outbreak.

Typically when you return to cooler, wetter conditions, these outbreaks would poop out. They didn’t just continue for years and years where they basically killed everything — the infestations would sort of self-contain. However, the problem now is we aren’t returning to cooler weather conditions. So over the past 25 years this beetle has just continued to advance: It just goes on and on until the beetles run out of trees.

Run out of trees? There goes that terrestrial carbon sink we're all depending on.

The Environment 360 interview focuses on how science can help turn this situation around. Some trees are unaffected. Maybe there are crucial genetic differences which humans can exploit to stop this beetle plague from spreading. (Read the interview). But then there's this, from National Geographic.

In 2013 scientists at the University of British Columbia sequenced the mountain pine beetle’s genome, making it only the second of more than 400,000 beetle species to bear that distinction. (The first was the red flour beetle, which infests stored grains.)

But Joerg Bohlmann, the plant biochemist who oversaw the sequencing effort, doesn’t think a biotechnical fix to the pine beetle epidemic is imminent.  “We have to be extremely careful we don’t promise things that are not realistic,” he says.

Pesticides can save a few individual trees but not a forest; they’re too expensive, and they’d kill all sorts of other organisms. Breeding beetle-resistant trees would take decades, even with modern genetics.

And even then the beetles might rapidly adapt and break through the resistance.

No help there! We don't have decades to get this situation turned around.

Think about it. The ecosystem of an entire Canadian province (British Columbia) is disappearing right before our eyes. And since the causes of this disaster aren't going away, that ecosystem isn't going to be making a comeback anytime soon. As Diana Six said, "there is no end in sight."

And this beetle plague is threatening to spread to the east straight across Canada through the boreal Jack pine forest (watch the video). It has already spread north into the Yukon.

Wow.

 

Comments

[Alexander Ac]

Thanks Dave!

"You would think this story would be getting more attention."

Seems like here, in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, I am the ONLY person talking about this catastrophe. But, anyway, why should peple here care, if Canadians and Americans don't?

We are all bussy with the next election of another asshole!

And so life goes one... here is also link to a longer documentary on bark beetles and BC forests (Beetles are coming):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24zxOYwhAys

Alex