Battle against pine beetle ramps up
Alberta’s fight against the ravenous pine beetle rages on, with the province providing thousands of dollars to control and eradicate the insect’s population. But officials say it’s a war that can never fully be won.
“Beetles are in our system now to stay, since they’ve kind of breached the Rockies in large numbers in the early 2000s,” said Mike Undershultz, a senior forest entomologist with Alberta Agriculture and Forestry.
The only way to have success in managing mountain pine beetle populations is to do it “aggressive and long-term,” Undershultz said.
The real problem exists right now in the middle to northwestern part of the province, said Mary Reid, a biological sciences professor at the University of Calgary, who researches mountain pine beetles.
“Jasper National Park has gotten a lot of beetles coming in from B.C., unprecedented numbers,” Reid said. “It probably has to do with the weather and the size of the trees that are available, potentially. They’re having good reproductive success.
“It’s not that they’re necessarily attracted to that area. Once they ’ve reached a particular population size then they can really kind of go to town.”
The areas of Grande Prairie, Whitecourt, Fox Creek and Slave Lake have in the past been hot spots for beetle activity, however the province has had success in reducing the bug ’s population in recent years.
On the flip side, increases in Jasper have made up for the downturn in those other areas.
“There isn’t really any situation currently in Alberta with that level of attack, that intensity, other than in that part of the province, so that’s why it’s a concern for us,” Undershultz said.
The province is providing nearly $600,000 worth of grants to municipalities around the province to suppress beetle populations on municipal and private lands.
The mountain pine beetle is considered the most destructive pest of mature pine forests in North America, said Alberta Agriculture and Forestry.
It ranges in length from four to 7.5 millimetres and is capable of killing all pine species including lodgepole, jack, ponderosa, whitebark, limber and Scots.
The insect can kill pine trees by introducing a blue-stain fungi when attacking them, which clogs and destroys the conductive tissue of the tree. Its larvae then feed in the phloem of the tree and this process can kill it within one month of the attack.
When populations are smaller, they prefer stressed, mature or over-mature (more than 80 years old) pine, but in regions with larger populations, even healthy trees are at risk of being killed.
The mountain pine beetle threatens six million hectares of Alberta’s pine forest.
Upwards of 90,000 infested trees throughout Alberta will be cut and burned this year to help control mountain pine beetle outbreaks and stop the bugs from spreading. The estimated cost to the province is $18 million to do so.
“I don’t suspect that we’ll ever eliminate mountain pine beetles from the system,” said Undershultz.
“So now it’s a matter of prioritizing where we will potentially do work depending on values at risk, whether it’s timber value or protection of Caribou habitat.”