 We're pleased to have Colleen Tierling from the Maine Forest Service to talk about the current threats posed by emerald ash borer and brown tail moth. Colleen is a forest entomologist and has spent 10 years largely focusing on invasive insects. Welcome Colleen. Hi. Thanks. So I apologize for the very boring title, but I had this talk already and then realized just before I left, I don't have a title. So, you know, invasive insects. I think your title, you know, invasive insects in your backyard is probably a little bit better. So first of all, I'm going to be talking about invasive insects, but I want to emphasize that for most of us, or for most insects, the vast majority of insects out there are beneficial. We would not survive without them. Okay. And I'm going to have to wander around and point at things. So we've got a lot of pollinators out there. If we didn't have pollinators, we wouldn't be eating very much at all. There are a lot of parasites and predators that if we didn't have parasites and predators, we would be knee deep in insects. And I think I just turned this off. Didn't I? Or no? No. Okay. And just cool insects that are out there that are a huge part of our ecosystem. So in general, insects are hugely important for us, even if we don't think about them very much. But every once in a while, an insect leaves the place where it was meant to be, comes somewhere else, and then it becomes a huge problem. And that's what invasive insects are. They're from someplace else, either from another continent, or even from, say, the west coast of our continent, from the west of the Rocky Mountains coming to the east. It's out of its environment. And all of a sudden, all the checks and balances that normally kept it under control are now gone. And that's when insects run amok. And by the way, if anybody has questions, just please interrupt me and ask them because I'd rather have more of a back-and-forth conversation rather than just be up here talking. So stop me if you have any questions. So I'm going to talk about a few of the insects that are an issue right here in Portland because we've been getting more and more of them recently. So brown-tail moth, you guys have probably heard about brown-tail moth. Probably everybody around here has heard about brown-tail moth. It is a caterpillar that has hairs on it. These hairs here, as well as a bunch of really tiny microscopic hairs, are toxic. And so it does feed on trees and it can actually kill trees, although it doesn't usually end up killing the trees, but it can. It certainly can cause the trees to decline and die back. But the main thing is that the caterpillars have these really toxic hairs. It can cause a rash. It's really miserably itchy. I can attest to that personally. And it can also cause respiratory distress. Every time the caterpillar molts, it sheds its skin and the hairs fall off and they're down in the environment. They're blowing through the air. If you breathe them in and if you're allergic to them, or if you have asthma, you can end up with pulmonary edema and people have ended up in the hospital. So it can be fairly serious. So the hairs are on the caterpillar, but they're also on the cast skins. And then when the caterpillar pupates, they use all those hairs to create their cocoons. And they stay toxic for up to three years. So often what happens is come winter or fall, somebody is cleaning out their gutters. And they're not even thinking about brown tail moth at that point of year, because brown tail has come and gone and it's not an issue. But there could be hairs in their gutters. There could be cocoons underneath their eaves or something like that and they're cleaning them off. And all of a sudden they've got a rash or they're having trouble breathing. And so that's something to remember is that those hairs are out there long after the caterpillars are gone. Most of the hairs get sort of incorporated into the soil, matted down under leaves and things like that. And so they're kind of out of the system. But in places where the hairs can accumulate, like in your gutters or on a boat or something like that, or a trailer that's parked under a tree, those hairs will stay toxic for up to three years. Our cold winter weather unfortunately does not kill brown tail moth. And I really wish it did, but our winter doesn't protect us at all. We have found that there is one thing that does tend to keep them in check and that's a cold wet spring. But we can't do a whole lot to control our weather. And so this year we had a very dry spring and brown tail moth is definitely not good this year. So a little bit of the history. So it comes from Europe. This is an issue in England and Europe. It's generally not as bad as it can get here because, again, it's a native insect there and things tend to keep it in check. They first came to down here in Somerville in Massachusetts in the late 1800s and just spread all throughout the northern New England states and then up into Canada, throughout much of New Brunswick and coastal Nova Scotia. And then it tended to retreat a little bit and we don't entirely know why. And then it retreated like right down to a few islands in Casco Bay and Cape Cod. That was partly because we were waging this war against brown tail moth in the early 1900s. And then after we kind of knocked it down, there were sort of periodic outbreaks over the next 60 years but fairly small. And then in the late 1980s is when it started to come back. So there were a lot of efforts made to try to control this insect. The winter webs were clipped, so probably you don't see it much in this picture, but all along the outside of the trees on the tips of the branches, they spend their winter in little folded up leaves. So back in the day, apparently they would hire school kids for a nickel web and they'd clamor around in trees, which I'm pretty sure we wouldn't get away with now. And they would clip them out and they'd have big bonfires. There were also spray projects initiated, trees were cut down. There was a big federal quarantine which has since been lifted and a big biological control program where they brought over diseases and parasites to try to keep them under control. And as I said, the population went right down to a very, very small area, just on a few islands off of Casco Bay. And the population stayed low for a long time and we don't entirely know why, possibly due to the weather, possibly due to this fungus here that I talked about, that still is out there and on wet springs the fungus does really do a number on brown tail. This is sort of showing you the populations of brown tail moth from our survey. Way back in 2003 when we were very naive, we called that an outbreak. And then you see where we are now. 2016 we thought, oh, next year is going to be really bad because we actually saw the populations rising really high in the fall. But then we had a really, in 2017 we had a cool wet spring and the population was much lower than we expected it to be. We don't have the graph for this year but way, way up there this year. And so the population's just been growing. And this is kind of our risk map. And Portland is actually, where's Portland? Portland is in pretty good shape. It's in an area that's not really awful. But there is some brown tail here. And this map has just been growing and getting redder and redder and redder over the last few years. So in the red is where it's really bad, orange not so bad, yellow pretty low. And then the blue is areas where people need to watch where we have just really small amounts. And I am not going to make your eyes glaze over with a life cycle. But just very briefly I want to show you when and where the hairs are around. So in the spring is when the, as soon as the leaves come out, the spring is when the caterpillars start to come out and they start feeding on the leaves. And as soon as they start feeding, that's when they start molting and dropping their shed skins and hairs start building up in the environment. And then in, am I sort of going in and out and does that matter? Okay, I don't need it for this. Okay, good. All right. That makes my life easier. So then in July, that's when the insects pupate, the caterpillars pupate. And again, as I mentioned, there's lots of hairs in the cocoons. And sometimes they'll pupate in the trees. Sometimes they'll pupate on structures like under your ease or under your picnic tables. Then in late July and into August is when the brown tail moth itself comes out. It's a beautiful little white moth and it's got a little brown tail. And if you're in an area with a lot of brown tail moths, you'll often see them coming to your lights at night. And they lay their eggs in August and the eggs hatch in August, September. But at that point in time, the caterpillars are so tiny that either their hairs are too small to actually have an effect on people or the toxin might not even be in the hairs and the research is still kind of up in the air about which is the case. But anyway, in the fall, you don't really need to worry about these caterpillars. They're really tiny. But they do hatch in the fall and they do a little bit of feeding out on the leaves on the outer edges of the trees. And then in the winter, that's when they fold together leaves and they silk a leaf together. And inside that leaf will be about 200 to up to 500 caterpillars or so. And they spend the winter inside that leaf. And so it's probably a good idea to familiarize yourself with that. If you see in the winter on an oak tree or an apple tree, I didn't mention that, did I? Their main hosts are oak and apple. And so if you see an oak tree or apple tree that all around the outside of the tree looks like they're just leaves still stuck to the tree in the winter, that's probably brown tail moth. And inside any one of those leaves would be the tiny little caterpillars just waiting for spring. If you look on a sunny day, you can often see that the leaf is attached to the twig with a little bit of white silk and you'll have to see that shining in the light. So in the winter at control, the best way to control these insects, if you can, is in the winter on low trees like apple trees, crab apple trees, small oak trees, you can cut the winter webs right out just with a pair of pruners. If you've got a slightly taller tree, I've been telling people just rent a pair of pole pruners because you can clip out all of those winter webs or hire somebody to do it for you and dunk them in a bucket of soapy water and you can make the problem go away entirely. That is absolutely the best way to control winter moth on a small tree. If you have a great big oak tree that has thousands of webs in it or hundreds of webs in it and you can't get up there obviously, then the only way to really control them is with chemical control. So there are pesticides that can be used. It needs to be done early in the spring though. By the time people start itching and started seeing that their trees are really defoliated, at that point in time it's too late to really do anything. Because even if you kill the caterpillars, the hairs are already out there and killing a few caterpillars, even if you kill a few thousand caterpillars in one little area, in the greater scheme of things, that's not going to really make a difference for the following year. So you really want to treat, if you're going to treat chemically, treat early on in the season. And just as sort of a word of caution, if you do decide that you have trees that you need to chemically control, or brown-tail moth, you want to do that. You want to find it our worst and call them early on. Because by spring these guys are so booked up and they're working flat out and they get to just a tiny fraction of the calls. Because when people start panicking and calling them up there's just not enough people to do the work. Call in the winter and make an appointment if you decide you want to do that. And of course the control is better if it's widespread. And if you decide you want to do chemical control, sometimes a whole neighborhood will get together and say we're going to treat these big oak trees. And it gets cheaper for everybody to do it that way. And then also you kind of clear the neighborhood of brown-tail moth. And that has happened in some of the towns where brown-tail has been really bad for a number of years. So let me just, I've got a picture here of what the little winter webs look like. And you see it just, this is an apple tree or crab apple tree, I guess. It just looks like there are little leaves stuck to the outside edge of the tree. When you look closely and you see here in the sunshine you can see there that it's covered in silk and the silk is attaching that little web to the tree. So getting a search image for that is really good. And definitely for all of these insects that I'm talking about, if you want more information about them you can go to our website or if you just even Google main forest service and brown-tail moth it would take you to our website and there's information there. And this, I'm not going to say too much about this but I've got a copy of this in the back on the table there. This is just some of the hairy caterpillars that we have here in Maine. Brown-tail moth, definitely you want to keep, you know, be very wary of it and keep an eye on it. It's easy to tell because you've got those two orange dots on the tail end of it. So it's invasive, gypsy moth is closely related to brown-tail moth, has hairs that can be irritating to people who are sensitive to it but not nearly to the extent of the brown-tail moth. It's also invasive. I know in Portland I had a call this spring from a woman who had gypsy moth egg baths on her house and they were crawling on her house and they gave her an asthma attack because she had asthma and so it is something that you need to be a little bit careful about. And then these two eastern tent caterpillars, the one that creates all those webs in the forks of trees. You see these big white silk webs in the trees. And then horse tent caterpillar, another native insect, I don't know if you heard the news of brown-tail but they were all over the roads there and they actually had to close roads because caterpillar guts were making the roads so slippery that there was causing accidents. So in general, hairy caterpillars, especially brightly-colored hairy caterpillars is probably good not to touch them. They're hairy and brightly-colored for a reason and it's basically to say, you know, stay away from me, don't mess with me, I'm toxic. Most of them luckily are not nearly as toxic as brown-tail moth but they, I tend to not pet furry caterpillars. So that's brown-tail moth. Any questions? Yeah. Are they really dangerous to birds? They, I think birds don't tend to eat them. We haven't seen a whole lot of birds eating them. I don't know how dangerous they are but I do know that pets will get the rash. I know my cat has gotten it anytime he's outside and I've gotten to the point and he actually carries the hairs inside. So every time my cat comes in, I meet him at the door with a wet washcloth and I just wipe him down entirely because it was on his face and where his fur was thin around his ears and he was scratching himself bloody. So yeah, definitely pets can get it. Probably, I'm guessing it probably does affect things like mice and rodents and squirrels and things like that. Not much we can do for them. So winter moth, another insect that has not been around for all that long in Maine. We found it probably about five or six years ago and another invasive species, again from Europe. And it's another moth but this time it's one of the naked moths. You don't need to worry about hairs. It's an inchworm. We've got a lot of native inchworms so don't worry that every inchworm you see is winter moth but this one definitely is. So this unlike brown-tailed moth which has a fairly narrow host range largely on oaks and apples, winter moth has a really wide host range. So a lot of the hardwood trees, the leafy trees, oaks again and apple are two of their favorite ones. And so a lot of our trees in this area are getting hammered by both winter moth and brown-tailed moth. But then there's also a wide range of other host trees, maple trees, birch trees, basswood, artillery trees, linen trees, blueberry. So it actually is an agricultural pest as well as a pest in the forest and a pest of landscape trees. The insect feeds really early in the season and so it feeds even before the leaves open up so when they're still in the bud and so you get this kind of Swiss cheese effect as it just mines through the bud creating holes kind of like when you fold up paper and cut out a paper snowflake that's sort of what's happening with the insect feeding. Then later on it tends to just feed and completely chew up the whole leaf. Winter moth is, oh, if you want to send around winter moth. Oh, and you can send around brown-tailed too, I think there's a top two there. Here, that's winter moth, yeah, and that's brown-tailed if you want to take a look at it. So winter moth is a really, really nondescript little beige moth and we wouldn't expect anybody to identify it just by looking at it. In fact, we can't even identify it by looking at it. We have to actually collect the males and dissect their genitalia in order to tell what species it is. So we have to do it under a microscope. But the way you can identify them is through their name, they're called winter moth and they actually fly, the adults fly in November to January. So sometime around Thanksgiving is when we often see them. And so from Thanksgiving right to January, the males will fly. The females actually don't even have wings. They've got very vestigial little bits of wings. So they don't fly. So in the fall, in the winter, in November, December, they crawl out of the ground where they've been pupating, crawl up the tree, they have pheromones that call all the guys to them and the males will come in and mate with them on the tree and then the females keep crawling up the tree, up to the top, and lay their eggs on the twigs and the branches. Then early, early in the spring, the caterpillars, the eggs hatch into tiny little caterpillars before the buds even hatch, or sorry, before the buds even open on the trees. And you can see a tiny little caterpillar there circled in blue. And that's when they cause this kind of feeding. They continue to feed into May and early June and then they drop down to the ground and they pupate. And they pupate in the soil and they're in there from June right through to November. Looking exactly like a piece of dirt. They use dirt to cover their cocoon. And remember that, that they're there from June to November, looking exactly like dirt. How they got here, we know that they, from genetic studies, we know that they came from Massachusetts. These insects are in Massachusetts. They have been a big issue in Nova Scotia as well, but the genetics say that ours came from Massachusetts. How do they get here when the females can't fly? Well, looking at the patterns of where they are, they're not in the forests, they're not right along the shore. Where we first found them was around the second homes of people who lived in Massachusetts. So, we figured probably what happens is, you know, you live in Massachusetts, you divide up your hostas, you say, I'll plant some up in my summer home up on the coast. And that's what happened. They dug up their hostas with all those cocoons in them looking just like dirt, and they had no idea what they were doing and brought it up here, and all around the second homes is where we found winter moth. So, that's what happens. And so, we have them now basically all along the coast, up as far as Bar Harbor we've been finding them. A few real hot spots in Portland, South Portland, has been one of the early spots where we found it. And they are killing the trees in Cape Elizabeth. If you drive along some of the roads, I can't remember which road now, but you can see big oak trees that are dead, and they've been killed by winter moth. Because the trees just get heavily defoliated, and then maybe gypsy moth comes along and defoliates them as well, or round-tail moth defoliates them as well, and if it happens year after year, a tree can take defoliation for a year or two, even complete defoliation for a couple of years. But if it happens multiple years, or if it gets defoliated twice in one year, that's it, the trees end up dying. And so, we're seeing mortality in some of those red areas. So, how do you control it? Practice safe soil. Don't move materials around from places that are infested. And we've actually had people be really responsible about this. There have been some libraries in some of the small towns that use plant sales as fundraisers, and they voluntarily decided we're not going to do a plant sale because we know we've got a lot of winter moth, and we don't want to set it out to other areas. Other places do have their plant sales, but they will tell people these plants are infested with winter moth. Don't take them out of this area. If you live in a winter moth infested area, sure, it's safe to buy them because you've already got winter moth, but if you live inland somewhere, don't buy these plants because you'll be bringing winter moth to your home and end up killing your trees. So, that's probably one of the most important things to do, is just don't move plants from underneath infested trees. If you've got plants that are out in the middle of a field where you're not likely to have pupa in it, because there's no trees nearby, those would be a little safer to move around. But anything that's underneath trees that are infested by hemlock will be a delgid, you're pretty much guaranteed that anytime that the frost is out of the soil and you're capable of moving winter moth, or when you're capable of moving your plants, you will also be guaranteed to pretty much move your winter moth. So, other ways of control, remember I told you that the female doesn't have wings, and so she climbs up in the fall when she comes out from the soil, she climbs up the tree and calls to the males and the males come and mate with her. So, if you can put sticky bands around the tree, she gets caught on these sticky bands and the males fly in and they get caught on that as well. And that can be effective, however you need to put bands around all of the trees in an area, because you guys have probably seen tiny little caterpillars that silked on a silk thread and then blow in the wind. That's how the caterpillars of winter moth move around as well. So, if you banded this tree, but this tree over here wasn't banded, and if this was also a maple tree or an oak tree, the caterpillars from that tree would just sort of swing over, kind of like Tarzan, and invest this tree as well. But that banding can work. Horticultural oil can also work. It basically smothers the insects, the eggs, and kills those eggs, and if you can get good coverage of your trees, that can be fairly effective. And then other than that, there's general conventional insecticides. BT is actually a bacterial insecticide that's considered, it's organic and only affects caterpillars, and can be used for organic growers. And that can be used, but you have to time it really carefully. It's also good for ecologically sensitive areas or if you just don't want to be exposed to pesticides, because it has pretty much no mammalian toxicity at all. Other than that, there are more general... Spinosid is a bacterial insecticide, and then just the standard chemical insecticides used for caterpillars can be used. What we're really sort of pilling all our money on, though, is Wintramoth biological control. I think I told you that Wintramoth, back in the 50s, had been an issue in Nova Scotia. They brought in this parasite, Syzenis albicans, which is a little fly that looks kind of like a spiky... a spiky housefly. A housefly with kind of a spiky hairdo. And it is a parasite. It lays its eggs on the leaves, and when the Wintramoth comes through and eats the leaves, it ingests the egg, which then hatches inside the caterpillar, and eats the caterpillar from the inside out. And so we entomologists think this is a wonderful thing, but we're sort of a perverse lot anyway sometimes. So that is something that worked really well in Nova Scotia, and it's very specific. It only attacks Wintramoth. And then when the Wintramoth populations just crash because they've all been attacked by the parasite, then the parasite numbers crash as well. And what they've just seen in Nova Scotia is that every once in a while, if the Wintramoth starts to rear its head again a little bit, then a year or so later the parasite does and knocks it right back down again. So it's the perfect biological control. It kind of just disappears along with the Wintramoth. It doesn't go on to anything else. They've been releasing this Syzenis parasite down in Massachusetts as well, and they've had a big problem with Wintramoth for a number of years, a couple of decades. And they're at the point now that their Wintramoth is starting to reduce the numbers as well. And so we've just started just a few years ago releasing these parasites. We're working with a researcher from University of Massachusetts and getting parasites from them and then releasing them all up and down the coast in areas where the Wintramoth is the worst. It should work for us. The evidence shows that it works for other places. And actually it works remarkably fast for forest entomology because usually biological control programs may take 50 to 100 years to actually build up enough numbers to create control because there's millions of these insect pests out there, and we're releasing these parasites by the hundreds or the thousands, so it takes a while for them to build up. But Massachusetts has been seeing good results within about 10 years or so. So we're hopeful that within 10 years, Wintramoth might not be that big of an issue. This is one of the few invasive insects that has a potentially happy ending to it. And so we can just avoid spreading Wintramoth further throughout Maine. Practice safe soil. Don't move around your plants. We may have a good answer for Wintramoth. And this is just sort of a little timeline that shows that Wintramoth is on the host plants. The eggs are on the host plants from the winter right through to the spring, and then comes spring. The larvae are on the host plants. They're on the host plants around at any time of year because when they're not on the plant, they're down in the ground. And so it's really not safe to move host plants or soil around them. What if you were like washing the roots before you transplanted it? You would need to wash them completely clean, so completely bare root, because if there's just a little bit of soil, these cocoons are really little and covered in dirt, so you could do it. And there have been some nurseries that do do that if it's a plant that will accept that. And that's Wintramoth. Any other questions about Wintramoth? Helmlock woolly adelgid. So that is another insect that is here. And do you want to send around the Helmlock woolly adelgid one? The Helmlock, yeah. So it is a little creature that's been here for quite a while. It's related to the aphids that you see on your roses or anything else. And when you see it, it's on the undersides of the twigs of the Helmlock trees. And it's only on Helmlock. We've got a lot of other woolly aphids and woolly adelgids that are on other kinds of trees. Some of them are invasive, some of them are not. We've got a lot of native ones as well. But if it's on Helmlock, then it's probably Helmlock woolly adelgid, looking like just sort of little puffy bits of cotton wool. And as I said, on the undersides of the leaves, this is where we have found it. This is an insect that moves around on trees a lot. So before we had a quarantine, originally we thought, well, if we put a quarantine, we don't want to totally disrupt the nursery industry. So we'll have people look very carefully at their nursery trees that they're selling. And if we can say, okay, yes, this is clean, then it'd be safe to sell. Well, we found planted Helmlock trees all the way up the coast to Machias and Way inland, where people brought in trees perfectly legally. They thought they were clean. Ten years later, we find that they're covered in Helmlock woolly adelgid. So that's when we then put a quarantine in to absolutely stop Helmlock trees coming in from infested areas. So this is where we have Helmlock woolly adelgid established in the forest. As I said, we found it on planted trees in various areas in the state. But those trees, we usually hammer them pretty heavily with pesticides or we cut down those trees entirely so that we don't start new infestations all over the state. Because this is an insect that we can't eradicate, but we're trying to slow down the spread. And so it started down in Kiddery and it just sort of moved up the coast. We found this big infestation on Fry Island there a couple of years ago. It's been there for a while and nobody really noticed it and we never go out to Fry Island, so we didn't notice it until the trees actually started to die. This is an insect that will kill trees much more slowly than say winter moth might. It usually takes a good 10 years or so depending on the climate. This is an insect that actually is somewhat controlled by winter. So in areas further north in Maine, up in this area, it certainly is not going to be a problem now. In the future, who knows exactly how the climate is going to change. But at this point in time, we expect it to be sort of an issue within 100 miles or so of the coastal area is where the adelgid can survive well. So how do we move this insect around? Well, as I said, we moved it on nursery trees. So this, the adelgid, most of its life, it spends actually attached right to the tree and it sticks its mouth parts into the twig at the base of the needle and has to stay there. There are really long mouth parts that are about twice the length of its body and it can't withdraw the mouth parts from the twig. But the very youngest of its, let me just go forward and then I'll come back. So the very youngest of its, once the eggs hatch, the very youngest larvae are mobile and they can crawl around. They have to go look for their own needle to attach to. They can crawl around quite a bit. Remember those tiny little bits of fuzz that I saw that you saw on the riker mount there? Under each of those, this whole thing is one of those tiny bits of fuzz and there's a tiny little larval, or nymphal adelgid. And this is a beet sheet that we put underneath an infested tenlock tree and we just beat the branch with a stick and it doesn't really look like there's a whole lot on there other than bits of twigs and stuff, but if you look more closely, all these tiny little bits here are crawlers. So there's thousands of them and they get moved around really, really easily. If people hire a landscaper or an arborist to work on their trees, if this arborist had worked on infested trees earlier that day or even earlier that week, his clothing would be covered, his hat would be covered, his equipment would be covered with crawlers, we find that animals move crawlers around, people move crawlers around, trees that are hanging over driveways. If you have somebody come visit you from an infested area and they brush up against your hemlock tree, during the season that the crawlers are around, then they will almost certainly transmit adelgid to your tree. So all year round, life plants can carry hemlock will be adelgid into new areas if plants are being transported. But March to July is when the eggs and the crawlers are around and that's the time when it's just so very easy to move adelgid. So if you're going to have work done on your hemlock trees, it's probably a good thing to try to do it in the fall or the winter because then you don't need to worry about the crawlers. So natural spread, these things move around in the wind. Again, March to July when those crawlers are around, they move around in the wind, they move around on animals, they move around on birds. And so I often suggest to people who have hemlock trees, if you want to try to protect your hemlock tree, think about maybe not feeding during the March to July period or if you do want to feed the birds, make sure your bird feeder is as far away as possible from your hemlock tree because you think how birds feed, they'll fly into a feeder and then fly back to a tree, the nearest tree and if that nearest tree is a hemlock tree, they'll make an end up transmitting hemlock will be adelgid. Often when I get a call, somebody says, I think I have adelgid on one of my trees, and if I go to their house, I look around and see where is their bird feeder? Yep, that's the hemlock tree. And always the hemlock tree that goes into the bird feeder is always the one that's infested. So just keep in mind that March to July is when they can easily be moved. And because all adelgids are females, we only have females here in North America. They don't need to mate. So all it takes is one adelgid to get moved onto a new tree and you can have a new infestation. There are two generations a year. Each generation can lay up to about 300 or so eggs. So 300 times 300, that's something like 90,000. You can go from one crawler that got transmitted to a tree to having 90,000 at the end of the season. So this insect can just kind of grow explosively. That's the potential to do that. So I mentioned things like, oh, that if you can prune your trees back so that you don't have vehicles brushing up against your trees, that's a good thing to do. This here, all these here, this is from Fry Island. These are all hemlock trees over here and down at the other end. These trees are looking pretty healthy. I had to look really hard and I just occasionally found one adelgid here and there. But this on this side right here is a hemlock tree that was overhanging this little lane way and brushing up against every vehicle that went in. That tree was practically dead because it picked up a delgid from every vehicle that went in and out. So that's definitely something that people can do to protect their trees is just prune them back so that you don't have cars brushing up against them, vehicles, trailers. Even prune them so you don't have... Parks have been doing this. Ferry Beach State Park has done this, that they prune their hemlock trees so that hikers don't brush up against the trees because a hiker can carry adelgid crawlers from one tree to the next to the next where they can walk through an infested park and then carry those adelgid crawlers back to their own trees and if they brush up against their own tree they've just transmitted adelgid. So pruning is probably one of the most proactive things that you could probably do. Biological control, we have been doing biological control as well for adelgid. There are no parasites for adelgid which we usually prefer. Parasites make the best biological control, there are diseases. Hemlock will be adelgid for some reason. It has no parasites at all. So we have been using predators. There are a couple of old predators we've been releasing. One is a tiny, tiny little black lady beetle, maybe a millimeter long, 8th, 16th of an inch. And the other one is a slightly larger beetle. They're both specific and so they don't attack other things. They can't complete their life cycle on other insects. They may occasionally snack on another insect but they're reliant on hemlock will be adelgid. However, it's really expensive to buy these insects and they're in pretty short supply so we release them by the hundreds here and there. And there are probably billions of adelgid out there. So this is definitely going to be one of those long-term biocontrol options. We don't know when it's going to work, we don't know how well it's going to work. The results from further south where adelgid has been around a lot longer suggests that these predators do actually help keep trees alive. But it will probably be decades before we start to see real results up here. Hemlock will be adelgid, can kill trees in about 10 years or so if it's having infestation. So certainly there are trees that are probably going to die unless they're protected with pesticides because it's just going to take a long time for biocontrol to take effect. So things that people can do if you've got hemlock trees, as I mentioned, trimming your trees is a useful thing to do. All these branches here that brushed up against hikers, the bark trim goes back and it does make a difference. If you have a tree in your yard that you can actually get coverage with a hose, a jet of water can actually knock a lot of those crawlers down and they're so tiny that by the time they crawl back to the tree and crawl up, a lot of them will die. So that can sometimes help a little bit as well. Cutting off heavily infested branches is a good thing to do as well. If you do do any trimming, you want to do that during the fall, winter so that you don't end up moving a delgered around. Yeah. You're just going to ask, can you cut those branches off? How should you dispose of them? Should you burn them or soak them away? Probably the best thing to do is during the... if you trim your branches during the fall and winter, so after August, before March, you can do pretty much anything to them then because any a delgered on those branches or actually attached to the branches, you cut the branches off, those will die. So then you can send them off to your transfer station or something like that or send them off to be recycled or composted or whatever. If you're cutting your branches in the spring and the summer when the crawlers are around, the best thing to do is just let them lie there under the tree. Very few of the crawlers are actually going to be able to make it back up the tree because you really don't want to start... you don't want to throw them on the back of a trailer and drive down the road with them because you'll just be releasing clouds of crawlers into the air into all of your neighbor's trees. So the best thing is just to let them lie on the ground and after maybe a month or so, you can then potentially take them and drive them to the dump or something like that. You could potentially put them in soapy water but usually it's big branches and that's a lot. You could potentially burn them too but in the spring and summer, you probably couldn't get a burn permit in some places anyway. And then of course there are also chemical options for people who have big beautiful hemlock trees and they really want to save an individual tree because it's important to them. Chemical options is probably about the only thing that really will work with good consistency and reliability. You can use horticultural oil or soap. It needs to be done usually once a year or so and then there are also systemic insecticides that can be injected right into the tree or just sprayed like this, just sprayed right onto the trunk of the tree and they will stay in that tree and they will protect the tree for anywhere between five and sometimes 10 years. So that is something that can be done if you're desperate to protect your beloved tree. And the other thing I mentioned this earlier, we do have a quarantine for hemlock woolly adelgid. And a quarantine basically means this is an area that we consider to be generally infested. You're not allowed to take stuff out of this area. So for the hemlock woolly adelgid quarantine, that's the area in gray. And so what the quarantine covers is live trees so no hemlock seedlings or nursery stock is allowed to move from the gray area out into the white area, the rest of the state. And then it also covers branches and twigs, anything that has green on it. So if somebody is doing logging down in that gray area and if they cut all the foliage off of the tree and just have the logs, those can actually go out of the quarantine area. But nothing with foliage can go out of the quarantine area because that's the thing that's going to be carrying the crawlers. But anything from outside of that quarantine area can move into the quarantine area. So you can take a hemlock from Bangor and you could bring it into Portland. So any questions about adelgid? Okay, one last insect and this is not something luckily that in Portland has yet. And I'm hoping it will be a long time before Portland gets emerald ash borer. But we did find, I did find, emerald ash borer for the first time in Maine just this month ago, pretty much exactly. Emerald ash borer is... Do you want to send around the emerald ash borer display? It's a really tiny insect. Here it is sitting on a penny. People often see pictures like that one over there of the emerald ash borer and it's a nice, clear, beautiful picture and they think, oh, it must be a big insect and it's not. It's really small. Bright, brilliant metallic green. On that mount there you'll see, down at the bottom I think, a little beetle called the tiger beetle. When it's alive, it's also brilliant metallic green and we get hundreds of calls every year. People say, I saw that emerald ash borer. So far it's always been the tiger beetle. But so that tiger beetle is just sort of there for your reference. It's a native insect. It's a really good little predator. It's actually one of the good guys. So this is where emerald ash borer is as of now. Well, actually, no, as of last September. So it's in a lot of states. It's out as far as Colorado, as far west, down as far as Louisiana and Georgia and Mississippi I think. They found it this spring in Vermont. So Vermont, the entire state of Vermont is now quarantined. And then we just found it way up north in, I'll show you us. So yeah, they found it in Vermont. This is the entire state there is quarantined. The lower half of New Hampshire has it, all that big red area. And we just found it right up there in Madalaska and Edmondson on the New Brunswick side. We actually found our infestation up there really early because they found it in Edmondson and they invited me to go up and take a look and see what they were doing and help with their survey for a day or so. And I stood in their sort of ground zero area where the trees were heavily infested. I looked right across the river and thought, that's an ash. That's an ash. That's an ash. All these are ash in name. And I knew we had it. So I came across the river that night and went out with a draw knife and peeled the bark off the trees. And yeah, we have it up there. So it was fairly early on in the infestation that the trees are still really looking healthy, which is good because it gives us a little bit more time to do, you know, to manage it a little bit. But actually, realistically, for you guys here in Portland, the find up in Edmond's there in Madalaska makes very little difference to your level of risk because Portland down here is an awful lot closer to the infestation in New Hampshire. And the town of Lebanon is right within a 10 mile expansion buffer zone there. And we expect to find it down right there in that corner of York County anytime now. And so probably for people along the coast here, it will probably come up from New Hampshire before it's going to come down from Madalaska. We do a lot of monitoring for emerald ash borer. You probably have seen over the past years those great big purple traps. They look like big box kites. They're about this big. They're covered in a sticky glue. And they've got a lure inside of them that smells kind of like an ash tree. It's not a great trap, but it's kind of the best that we have and it's something that's relatively cheap and we can put out by the thousands. And so we do put out a lot. Something that is actually much better is to create a trap tree. And so I've been, I work a lot with woodland owners and volunteers and state parks and national parks and Acadia National Park and a lot of different places where we will girdle an ash tree in the spring. And the tree stays alive all summer. But it's stressed. And so it's releasing all these stress volatiles, these stress scents into the air. And if there is an emerald ash borer nearby that tree, instead of just going to a random ash tree, it'll come to that particular ash tree. Then in the fall or the winter we cut down the ash tree and we peel the bark off of it. It's really laborious and we do have to sacrifice a tree. But we look then for the little galleries under the bark. Because emerald ash borer does burl underneath the bark and essentially kills the ash tree from the inside. So that is something we have a lot of people doing. The other thing that we do, which is kind of cool, it's kind of a homegrown method of looking for emerald ash borer is biosurveillance, which we developed here in Maine. And that uses a little native wasp. It looks kind of like a yellow jacket, but it doesn't sting, it can't sting. And it goes out and the females go out and they hunt bupressed moss. They hunt our native bupressed beetles. They hunt our native bupressed ones that are related to emerald ash borer. And when emerald ash borer does come in an area, these little wasps are really good at catching emerald ash borer as well. And so what we do as we go out to schools is where we mainly find this. We find this in school ball fields. And during the summer months, we go out and we find nests of these little wasps in the grounds, in the ball fields, ball diamonds. And watch them come in, and when they're carrying something, we'll net them and we'll steal away their prey, just a small portion of their prey, and look to see what species it is. And then we let the female go and she kind of shakes her head as what happened there and flies off and catches another bupressed. And so because human beings are really bad at finding emerald ash borer, we're getting the wasps to do our hunting for us. And that has worked actually really well in some of the other states. We only have this wasp in sort of the lower southern and western part of the state because we're at the very northern edge of its range. But in states to the south of us, it's done a fairly good job of being the first one to detect emerald ash borer. Our other ally over there, there's also just people being educated, knowing what to look for, which is really, really important because we only have, oh, right now we're down to two entomologists, two forest entomologists in the state. And the chance of us actually going out and seeing emerald ash borer in the forest is pretty slim. So having a bunch of other people out sort of keeping their eyes open is really good for us. The other ally that we have are woodpeckers. Woodpeckers like to feed on emerald ash borer underneath the bark. And so in the winter, they're a really good food source because they're nice and fat and juicy and lots of protein in there. And woodpeckers will feed, and as they're feeding, digging down into the bark to get the pull the larva out, they'll flick off this outer bark and you get instead of this deep grayish-brown color, you see this bright blonde color. And if you see that on ash trees, that means woodpeckers have been feeding on something in that ash, and that something might be emerald ash borer. And so that's how a lot of other places have made their first identification of emerald ash borer, is watching where the woodpeckers have fed, in the winter when the leaves are off, it's easy to see, and the woodpeckers are hungry in the winter, and that's good food source. So that's something to keep your eyes open for. And that is the end of my talk. If anybody has any other questions, I'd be glad to answer anything. A few of the pesticides or the treatments we talked about were in oil. What is that exactly? It's horticultural oil. It's a garden center. It's basically just a mineral oil. So it's not really toxic to humans. And it's used in organic farming all the time. And basically what it does is it coats the tree, the eggs, things that are overwintering on the tree. You apply it usually in the late winter or early spring. It sometimes is called... I guess horticultural oil is usually what it's called, sometimes I think it's been called dormant oil. Actually, yes. Neem has been used... I think it's been used against emerald ash borer. And I think... In the U.S., the U.S. tends to have not quite as strong or stringent... The rules are different in the U.S. than they are in Canada for pesticides. And so Canada does not have a lot of pesticides in the U.S. does, and so it uses neem a lot more. And so they've been using that for a delgid and against emerald ash borer, I believe. So yes, neem is certainly something that can be used. It's not used that much in the States because people tend to use the harder pesticides, the more conventional chemical pesticides. But yeah, it can often be used. Just thinking about these insects, they do not care about geographical borders. So how do you, as entomologists, communicate our network around these invasive species? Really well. Neem actually shares a whole lot more border with Canada than it does with other New England states. And so as entomologists, we have working groups that, you know, the Northeast Forest Pest Council, which is all of New England and all of the Canadian Maritimes, Atlantic Canada and Quebec. And we get together once a year, sort of in one central area and share information. We talk to each other an awful lot. And so when New Brunswick found emerald ash borer right on our border, the moment that they had it identified and were able to talk about it, they called us and the very next day, I was on my way up there to go over and see their infestation. And when we found it on our side, I let them know we will be, when we do biological control for emerald ash borer, because that's definitely one of the things that we will be doing. Because I didn't go into all of that, but there is biological control for EAB as well. We will probably be coordinating so that what we do on our side is equivalent to what they do on their side, because not only is the emerald ash borer going to fly across the border, because the river's pretty narrow up there, but also the parasites will be flying back and forth. So we do interact a lot with them. And at a provincial and a state level, we have freedom to do that. And that's really, really important. Mine's quick. Where do you report a sighted emerald ash borer? Is there like... I've got in the back, there's a little brochure that shows you the various signs and symptoms. One of the things to look for is, if you see bark splits, and underneath the bark split, you might see some of that S-shaped gallery. I think on the display that I handed around, there's a little piece of bark that had sort of the tunnels underneath the bark, kind of showing you what that looked like. So those are some of the things you can look for. Definitely, woodpecker feeding is something to look for. There are kind of a D-shaped exit hole, and there's again cards back there that you're welcome to take. And they have very distinctive exit holes when they come out from under the bark. Those are really small though and sometimes it's hard to see unless the tree has actually been cut down so there are definitely a few signs to see. And just the trees declining. So if you see a lot of ash trees that are dying, especially from the top down, and it's spreading from one tree to the next, and trees are dying within a few years, that's something to definitely give us a call for. And we'll come check it out. I'm just wondering if you're talking about how the brown-tailed moths populations were controlled a few years ago. Is that still an active program or did they just cut it off? Yeah, they cut that off. There was federal funding for this a long time ago and I think in the 60s or so, they had it basically, they had chased it out to just a few islands offshore, the Casco Bay area, and then the feds cut the funding for that saying, it's not that big a deal. And so there was no funding to do anything and the quarantine was lifted and it did eventually come back. And I think now probably people are kicking themselves because now we've got this huge, huge problem. It's still fairly localized. No other state really cares about it the way Maine does because it's not really anywhere else in the country except potentially, or it is in Massachusetts. It has the potential to move to other New England states. It hasn't yet, but I think we're finally convincing the entomologists in some of our neighboring states and certainly Nova Scotia and New Brunswick are taking it seriously as well and they're looking for it because they know it could spread today with those states again. And is it getting just as like, I know it's growing a lot in Maine. Is it doing the same in Massachusetts? I'm not entirely sure. I think it's not as bad yet. It's not growing there as fast. It seems to be kind of an epicenter for us around the Bath Brunswick area and has been moving south and north or east and west along the coast as well as moving inland hugely. So I'm not sure. Certainly I think Massachusetts is a little bit on the rise. I don't think it's nearly as bad as we are at this point. Not as widespread.