9/10: Mountain Pine Beetle

[Undertoad]

The caption:

The towering pine trees of British Columbia's rugged Caribou Region are paying with their lives for five consecutive winters that have not been cold enough to kill a tiny predator. Thousands of trees are infested with mountain pine beetles in an exploding infestation that threatens to destroy more than C$4 billion ($2.6 billion) in timber in an area dependent on the forestry industry. The mountain pine beetles is pictured in this undated handout photo.

This relates to dhamsaic's image about genetic engineering. One aspect of GE foods/trees/pets/etc is that it encourages "monoculture" where all of the crops in a field, area, state, country, world, etc are identical species. The above bug is one reason why that's a bad idea. The potato famine, in Ireland, was the result of monoculture. A disease developed in one type of potato and because all the potatoes in Ireland were the same variety, it spread very quickly.

This is often the basic argument against GE. However, monoculture is not only the result of man's intervention nor of genetic engineering, but also of nature. Some plants are just better than others at getting copies of their DNA out there, and the forests of pine susceptible to this bug are one such example.

I had to know more about this, so I went and did some quick reading. From

http://www.forestry.ubc.ca/fetch21/F...osae/pine.html (also has some decent pictures)

-- the beetles "attack" trees and lay egg "galleries" about 3 feet (90 cm) long. When the larvae hatch, they chew the hell out of the bark, "girdling" the tree. My guess is that since the bark is destroyed, nutrients cannot get to the rest of the tree, killing it.

There's also good information at

http://ext.nrs.wsu.edu/info/fhn/mtpinebt.html

but a quick search on google will show you both of those. The beetles are, at adult size, about 1/5" in length (1/2 centimeter) and are considered the most damaging bark beetle. According to the US Forestry Service, they were responsible for the destruction of nearly 300,000 trees in 1990. 1991 was even worse.

Pretty destructive little buggers...

[russotto]

Originally posted by Undertoad


The caption:

The towering pine trees of British Columbia's rugged Caribou Region are paying with their lives for five consecutive winters that have not been cold enough to kill a tiny predator. Thousands of trees are infested with mountain pine beetles in an exploding infestation that threatens to destroy more than C$4 billion ($2.6 billion) in timber in an area dependent on the forestry industry. The mountain pine beetles is pictured in this undated handout photo.

This relates to dhamsaic's image about genetic engineering. One aspect of GE foods/trees/pets/etc is that it encourages "monoculture" where all of the crops in a field, area, state, country, world, etc are identical species. The above bug is one reason why that's a bad idea. The potato famine, in Ireland, was the result of monoculture. A disease developed in one type of potato and because all the potatoes in Ireland were the same variety, it spread very quickly.

Well, you don't need a monoculture to have devastation, as the chestnut blight proved. And I think GE used properly can actually reduce the dependence on monoculture which traditional breeding encourages. With genetic engineering, you can identify the specific traits you want and add them to many different species, something traditional breeding can't do. Whether it will actually be used this way is another question.