Fun With YouTube

Recent YouTube videos with a fresh, crisp, invasive species theme:

• The Statesman Journal has an interesting report about the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife's search for non-native fish species in the wild. There's one about invasive American bullfrogs as well.
• Someone was nice enough to capture the lecture given David Orwig of Harvard Forest about the hemlock woolly adelgid and stick the whole thing on YouTube.
• The Florida Department of Agriculture has a creepy, crawly PSA about the Mexican red-rump tarantula.
• The Great Lakes Mayors hosted an hour-long panel on invasive species issues.
• The Zoological Society of London posted a video about surveys for invasive species in the Thames River, including the Asian clam and the zebra mussel.

Climate Out-Of-Control

Interesting article in The Boston Globe about the spread of the hemlock wooly adelgid (Adelges tsugae) throughout New England. The ISW has certainly covered this insect pest before, including this NPR story about the problems caused by the adelgid in Massachusetts. Now there is even more bad news: while biologists once thought that the adelgid could not become a problem in the more northern climes of Vermont and Maine, climate change has busted a hole in that assumption. A nice cold winter freeze will kill the insects, but recent climate data indicates that the average minimum temperature in upper New England has risen several degrees over the past few decades. That means it is getting less and less likely every year that a killing freeze will come by and wipe out any lingering adelgids - bad news for the hemlock trees!

Adopt-A-Beetle

The Girl Scouts of Penn's Woods have come up with a unique spin on a project to save Pennsylvania's hemlock trees (Tsuga canadensis), according to this article from NEPA Today. Send them $3 and you can adopt a ladybird beetle (Pseudoscymnus tsugae), the only natural predator of the hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae). The Adopt-A-Beetle program will send you an adoption card and a picture of a ladybird beetle that can be decorated, then sent back to be posted on the "wall of beetle heroes." You can purchase the kits at the address given in the article, or by calling 1 (800) 432-4672. The troop is hoping to raise enough money to purchase and release 5000 beetles. Without predators, the spread of the woolly adelgid will comtinue unchecked, and it only takes seven years for them to kill an adult hemlock tree.

Double Teamed

Hemlocks infested with wooly adelgid (Adelges tsugae) aren't really big news in the world of invasion ecology any more. But then there's this article from the Erie-Times News, describing how the wooly adelgid is teaming up with the elongate hemlock scale (Fiorinia externa) to devastate forests of hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) in the northeastern U.S. The attacks of these two species of sucking insects, combined with recent drought conditions, have led to a strong decline in the number of hemlock trees in the forest. While they have had some luck with biological controls for wooly adelgid, there is as of yet no treatment for elongate hemlock scale.

Eastern Hemlocks are not schoolgirls, but they are the state tree of Pennsylvania

This article from The Morning Call has a silly introduction, but is worth a read. Pennsylvania, refusing to let their Eastern hemlock trees (Tsuga canadensis) die a white, crusty death via the Hemlock Wooly Adelgid (Adelges tsugae), is releasing tens of thousands of beetles (Pseudoscymnus tsugae) in the hopes of controlling the nasty creatures. Here's wishing the tiny beetles good luck, and please don't eat anything native!