Posts Tagged: Paine

Is California eucalyptus the target of biological terrorism?

Over the years, Timothy Paine, professor in the UC Riverside Department of Entomology, has become increasingly convinced that someone or some group has brought a series of pests from Australia to California to get rid of California's eucalyptus trees, according to a story on NPR's All Things Considered.

"You can find alternative explanations for all of this, no question about it," Paine said. "This is something we think is likely to have happened, but we don't have a smoking gun."

Paine's suspicions were raised by introductions of 16 eucalyptus pests over the past 25 years. The pests were introduced a few at a time in batches from different regions Down Under.

"They would be from Queensland, or they would be from New South Wales, or South Australia," he says.

The demise of eucalyptus in California, where they aren't native species, isn't Paine's greatest worry. 

"But if you're talking about a major food crop, or a disease organism, the prospects are very, very disturbing," he said.

Mountain pine beetle turns trees into firewood

Tim Paine, professor in the UC Riverside Department of Entomology, discussed wood-boring beetles and wildfires during a six-minute interview on The Madeleine Brand Show, which is broadcast on KPCC, Southern California's public radio affiliate.

Mountain pine beetle is active from northern New Mexico to Northern British Columbia, Paine said.

"It has killed large numbers of trees in the whole range. in some places upwards of 90 percent of the trees are killed by the beetle. Its devastating," Paine said. "You see vast areas of gray ghosts of trees."

Mountain pine beetles bore through the outer bark of the tree and construct their feeding galleries underneath the bark, disrupting water movement through the tree and killing the tree in the process.

Paine said global climate change appears to be extending the mountain pine beetle's range.

"Apparently, in the higher elevations of the Rocky Mountains, temperatures warmed enough that the beetles are advancing up into higher elevations where they weren't before," Paine said.

Though beetles and fire are part of forests' natural eco-system for millennia, the landscape has been changed by long periods of human fire exclusion. Now, when these areas do burn, the fires are more intense than they would have been otherwise.

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