The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) has awarded a Cornell entomologist a $50,000 grant to help eradicate the Asian long-horned beetle (Anoplophora glabripennis).
Wreaking havoc with hardwood trees in Brooklyn and on parts of Long Island, the beetle is considered by experts to be poised to threaten commercial tree industries -- including the maple syrup, lumber and tourism industries -- in the Northeast.
E. Richard Hoebeke, assistant curator for the Cornell Entomology Collection, will receive the grant to research and help produce a comprehensive, illustrated handbook for the identification of the beetle genus group and for pest control. The handbook, made in collaboration with USDA-ARS entomologist Steven W. Lingafelter, will be used by port-of-entry authorities to help stop infiltration of the beetle at the U.S. borders.
"Usually we have difficulty producing handbooks or materials to help identify pests without the proper monetary resources," Hoebeke said. "But because of the significance of this beetle, we now have the resources to make an effective handbook."
This USDA-ARS grant money was funded in the latest agriculture appropriations bill in Congress. In close consultation with New York Sens. Alfonse D'Amato and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and New York Reps. James Walsh and José Serrano, who serve on the House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) proposed the appropriation to help eradicate the pest. The beetle has no known natural enemy in North America. The entomologists believe the Congressional funding effort may prove crucial for saving hardwoods in New England from New York's plight.
Hoebeke and Lingafelter, of the USDA's Systemic Entomology Laboratory in Washington, D.C., will travel to China this summer and explore the Chinese woodlands to get samples for further research of the hardwood pest and related species in the genus Anoplophora.
Information on the beetle genus is limited. Most of the modern information was written in the 1940s and 1950s, and most of it is written in Chinese.
In August 1996, residents of Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood believed teen vandals were drilling holes in hundreds of maple trees, one of the types of hardwoods prone to the Asian long-horned beetle. After a resident found a strange, black and white bug on the trees and passed it along to New York City's Department of Parks and Recreation, more beetle samples were sent to Carolyn Klass, a Cornell Cooperative Extension entomologist in Ithaca, to determine the species. Klass had never seen the species before and showed it to her colleague, Hoebeke.
"I gasped when I saw it," he said. "I knew this wasn't a species native to North America."
By mid-September 1996, scientists at the USDA Systematic Entomology Laboratory in Washington, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh and the Bishop Museum in Honolulu had confirmed Hoebeke's worse fears: Hundreds of Asian long-horned beetles -- unfettered by any natural enemies -- were dining on New York's hardwood trees.
Jealously guarded U.S. border entrances normally can keep such pests from infiltrating this country, but Hoebeke believes the Asian long-horned beetle slipped through in a wooden crate.
To combat the problem, New York officials cut down every tree with an infestation. Currently, state- and federal-imposed quarantines exist in Brooklyn and Long Island, which means that cut wood and firewood cannot be taken out of those areas.
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