Gather round, dear readers, and let me tell you the story of a nasty invasive insect.
No, wait, don’t run away — this is a happy story. And it involves a cute dog named Izzy.
Our story concerns the Asian longhorned beetle, a beetle native to east Asia that, no surprise, has long horns (well, antennae). Like so many other invasive bugs, it arrived here unexpectedly, probably carried on some imported wood or plants. Finding to its delight that none of its natural predators were here, it promptly spread out.
It came to my attention in August 2008, when Massachusetts officials announced that ALB, as it is known, had been found munching on trees in the city of Worcester. Everybody freaked out because the ALB is something of an omnivore that can damage multiple species, whereas most invasive bugs are a hazard to just a single type of tree.
Haunted by visions of ALB denuding New England’s forests, officials quickly chopped down and chipped some 30,000 trees in and around Worcester. That sounds drastic but was necessary.
“Because of the way the insect lives inside the tree, chemicals cannot reach it. It lays eggs in cambium just under the bark. Within two weeks the egg hatches and larvae starts feeding into the hardwood,” said Felicia Hubacz, a forest health specialist with the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation. “When we find an infested tree, we have to cut it down and chip it into 1-by-1 inch pieces. We found through multiple studies that larvae cannot survive that.”
They also imposed a moratorium on moving wood that soon expanded into many other towns.
Then, beetles were found on a few trees in Boston and it seemed like ALB was on the march. In 2010, when Hubacz first joined the program, “we were finding it everywhere and it seemed like an overwhelming task.”
I wrote a bunch of stories about it back then, predicting that it would soon show up in New Hampshire. But it never did. It was quickly eradicated from Boston, and there’s a chance that it might have been wiped out from Massachusetts entirely.
In fact, I had almost forgotten about it until I recently got a press release from the U.S. Department of Agriculture asking people in Worcester County, Mass., to keep an eye out for signs of the beetle. It’s part of an extensive program to determine whether ALB has been wiped out from what had been the largest outbreak in the country.
Massachusetts is running regular surveys, searching for any signs of ALB. Ground teams of four people knock on doors and look at every ALB host tree on the property (99% of the trees it has infested so far have been maples), both examining the bark and staring up into the crown with binoculars. The state also has several climbing teams “who will get up into the trees and do a more thorough search,” Hubacz said.
Then there’s Izzy.
“We just added a canine unit. The USDA has a dog and trainer who will go out and dog will sniff the frass that ALB creates,” Hubacz said, frass being the technical term for insect poop. “He doesn’t even have to go directly up to a tree. And a dog won’t get confused if there’s a lot of them in the area.”
This is not an isolated usage of canines’ olfactory talent, incidentally. Dogs are used to detect the scent of bedbugs, termites and other building pests and other invasives like spotted lanternfly. They are even used to find pods of orcas — they ride in boats and smell the killer whales’ poop, which floats.
Finally, Massachusetts is still hanging traps from trees that contain five lures: three plant volatiles that mimic maple and two pheromones specific to ALB.
If all these methods can go three years without finding any sign of the insect in a given area, it can be removed from the quarantine area, as has happened in the town of Auburn. No live beetle has been found since 2015 and the last sign of recent ALB damage was in 2021, so they’re hopeful.
“But if we find even one beetle, that changes everything,” Hubacz said.
The obvious question is: Why can’t we do this with all the other tree-destroying bugs?
Unfortunately, the main reason we’re winning against ALB is that it barely flies at all. This means a quarantine can contain it whereas nasties like the emerald ash borer just take to the air and fly to the next town. Containing bugs that fly is much, much more difficult.
Nonetheless, we need to take lessons from our ALB success. If we hadn’t had systems in place to deal with such problems, it could have been spread far and wide by people before it was noticed and then never been brought under control.
“This has shown me that a quick response to an invasive species can minimize the damage, especially when we have all the science about the insect and we can use that science against it. We also have to get the message across and get folks to understand that moving wood can move invasives. In Worcester, people have been very good about it,” Hubacz said.
“Boston is a prime example of finding it early. A ground maintenance person there had recently had training, went out and saw the trees, reported it immediately. Three years later it was completely eradicated.”
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