Today we’ve got a profile on a certain pest that is currently a great concern to the economy and to home owners everywhere, the Emerald Ash Borer. The Emerald Ash Borer was transported from Asia, they assume it was carried overseas on a crate or some wood product. So far their have been 200,00 confirmed trees infested by the ash borer in Essex county in Southern Ontario and somewhere around 6 million trees have been killed in the Michigan area.
Currently there is no way to control their spread through the use of pesticides or biological agents as they have no natural predators in this part of the world and the damage is confined to the insides of the tree as caused by the ash borer larvae which devour the tree from the inside out. At the moment the only method of controlling this pest is to quarantine and cull infested trees from the forest. This is not as effective as other measures could be as the ash borer finds ways to ‘jump’ from tree population to tree population.
To me this is a travesty, trees are one of Canadas greatest assets and to see them cut down by an unfightable pest really kills me, it angers me to think that our great forests are threatened by a pest due to some companies royal screw up. It is my dearest hope that we can find some way to fight this pest and remove it from our landscape and blast it from our land as the invasive species it is. Yeah, they really tick me off. Ciao!
Actually, the ash tree death toll in Michigan is much larger than 6 million. It’s probably closer to 25 million now. I’m sure it larger in Canada, as well.
There are actually insecticides available to fight EAB for those who want to save their ash trees; check it out on the http://www.emeraldashborer.info Web site.