New Jersey Wins Fight Against a Tiny Invader

I was browsing through the New York Times Science section when I came upon this happy headline:

New Jersey eradicates the asian long-horned beetle after an 11-year fight.

But this month, New Jersey declared victory in its war against the Asian long-horned beetle, an invasive, hardwood-eating insect that arrived on the shores of New York City in 1996, most likely on wood pallets. The beetle has since surfaced in a total of five states and, by tunneling through tree trunks, has threatened some of the nation’s most common tree species, including maples, London planes, birches and poplars.

The beetles lay their eggs inside the bark of the tree, and after the eggs hatch, larvae feed on the trunk’s hardwood. “It kills a tree by eating the wood from the inside out,” said Rhonda Santos, a spokeswoman for the federal Agriculture Department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. “If you took a cross section of a tree infested by Asian long-horned beetles, it would look like Swiss cheese.”

More than 20,000 trees were removed in New Jersey during the struggle, but — knock on wood — the beetles are now vanquished from the Garden State. “It shows that the program works,” said Paul J. Kurtz, a state entomologist who led the eradication effort. “I’ve been doing this for 11 years nonstop, so it’s a little weird that it’s over. But at the same time, it’s like, ‘Wow, we did it.’ ”

(Paul J. Kurtz, a state entomologist, led the eradication effort against the Asian long-horned beetle)

Just because New Jersey has conquered the Asian long-horned beetle does not mean that Mr. Kurtz is idle. “If you’re not minding the store,” he said, “someone else could come in.” He was referring to the emerald ash borer, an invasive insect and fast flier that attacks ash trees and is now in 18 states, including Pennsylvania and New York. “It’s inevitable,” he said of the ash borer’s arrival. “We’re surrounded.”

Well done, Mr Kurtz. Well done, New Jersey!

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Plants mimic scent of pollinating beetles

How about this for sneaky-boots behaviour!?

This conclusion, reported both in ScienceDaily.com and PhysOrg.com, really caught my eye. How could a flower pull a fast one on an insect?

It is a generally accepted belief that the colour and scent of flowers and their perception by pollinator insects evolved in the course of mutual adaptation.

It usually goes something like this… Flowers give off a nice scent. Insects like the scent. The nicer the scent, the more insects go to that flower. The flower adapts, is very successful and multiplies accordingly. The insects adapt, feed more easily and multiply accordingly. The flower whose scent attracts the most or most successful pollinator insects is the ‘fittest’ in Darwinian survivalist terms, as is the insect who is attracted to that particular scent. An evolutionary win – win.

(Amorphophallus konjac [Image credit: University of Zurich])

However, evolutionary biologist Florian Schiestl from the University of Zurich now proves that this was not the only scenario, at least not with the arum family, which evolved its scent to match the pre-existing scents of scarab beetles and thus adapted to the beetles unilaterally. The mutual adaptation between plants and pollinators, therefore, does not always take place.

In other words, the plant, on its own, adapted to imitate the smell of the scarab beetle and apparently, the scarab beetle had little if anything to do about it. Talk about sly!

Schiestl and Stefan Dötterl, a colleague from Bayreuth, studied the arum family and one of its pollinators, scarab beetles. In the beetles, they discovered many scent molecules used for chemical communication that were also found in the plants.

(Amorphophallus konjac [Image credit: University of Zurich])

 ”In the course of evolution, the arum family mimicked the scents of scarab beetles to attract pollinating insects more efficiently,” says Schiestl.

Co-evolution is regarded as a driving force behind the development of a mutual adaptation between two organisms. However, this is not true of the arum family, which developed its scent along the pre-existing communication of scarab beetle scents. “Co-evolution between plants and pollinating insects might well be less common than we thought,” Schiestl concludes.

Smartly done, Arum Family! Well played!!

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Florian P. Schiestl and Stefan Dötterl. “The Evolution of Floral Scent and Olfactory Preferences in Pollinators: Coevolution or Pre-Existing Bias?” Evolution. International Journal of Organic Evolution. March 12, 2012.

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Bonsai Graveyard

There was a point in my innocent yet not too distant past when I had dreams of tending bonsai trees in my home.

I saw myself as a kind of Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid, carefully pruning and bending, shaping and creating the tiny tree over time into a work of art.

I was a hopeless failure.

For those who have never attempted to take on the task of caring and feeding a bonsai tree, let me tell you it is the closest thing you’ll ever have to keeping a pet.

It requires attention but not too much attention, light but not too much light, water but not too much water, and the temperature must be mild… not too warm, not too cold. A breeze perhaps… but not too much of a breeze.

Piece of cake, I thought to myself as I bought my first bonsai trees (twigs, really)… tiny miniature things I picked up at the florist section of my local grocery store.

I displayed them proudly in my apartment.

They were all dead in three months.

Clearly, you get what you pay for, I reasoned, and headed off to a proper greenhouse and chose a proper bonsai tree… a juniper (Juniper Procumbens Nana)… the one recommended for beginners because they are easy to care for and quite hardy.

.

(Like the one I bought… minus the golf ball)

I studied. I read. I did everything I was supposed to do. Things went well for about three or four months.

By the sixth month, it was dead.

(Bonsai tree – deader than Elvis)

 I tried again. It, too, was dead within six months.

Over the course of about two years (I am nothing if not stubborn… or stupid), I managed to murder more than a few bonsai trees.

I finally came to the grim realization that, no matter how well-intentioned I was, no matter how much I loved the idea of bonsai trees and their connection to Japan and Japanese culture, no matter how much of a samurai spirit I had sparking within me, whatever it took to grow bonsai trees successfully, I didn’t have it.

(A stark yet elegant beauty in death)

 What I did have was a kind of bonsai graveyard… a bleak necropolis of brown and withered miniature trees.

At first, I kept them as an almost perverse testament to my failure as a gardener. But then, over time, they took on another personality.

The dead trees had a funereal loveliness all their own. In death, they created their own form of art… a sepulchral style far beyond anything I could have created on my own.

And so they stand to this day.

It might be that one day I will head on down to my local greenhouse to pick up a bonsai tree and give it another try… but if I do, there will be no sense of failure or loss if and when the tree dies.

It will simply be transforming itself from one form of beauty into another.

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