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In Battle to Save Hemlocks, Hope Rests on a Beetle
from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
Armed with a Wiffle Ball bat and a canvas sheet, entomologist David Mausel is scouring forests across New England for an ally. That ally - a small jet-black beetle - feasts on the even tinier but voracious hemlock woolly adelgid, which is ravaging the region's hemlocks. The adelgids latch onto twigs, feeding on the trees until their needles yellow and fall and the trees die.
Mausel has been in cahoots with these beetles since 2007, when he began collecting a small army of them in Idaho and brought them back East to release at specific study sites.
Now, he is beginning to revisit those plots to determine whether the beetles have begun to establish themselves - and to begin to answer the bigger question of whether they are reducing the adelgid population and saving hemlocks. Mausel, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, calls it "finding a beetle in a haystack."
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