Palm trees across Central Florida
may be in danger from a bacteria that is spreading a deadly disease.
For nearly 10 years, a killer has been marching across the state, leaving countless victims in its wake.
It’s a bacteria that cause a fatal disease called Texas Phoenix Palm Decline. And it is threatening the Canary Island date palm, the wild date palm, the edible date palm, and also the native Sabal palmetto.
Scientists haven’t declared an epidemic yet, but the hardest hit areas so far are in Central and Southwest Florida, including Orange, Polk, Charlotte, Hardee, Highlands, Hillsborough, Manatee, Pinellas and Sarasota counties.
In the past two years, it’s been discovered in Broward, Palm Beach, Duval, Lake and Indian River counties.
Ben Bolusky, chief executive officer of the Florida Nursery, Growers & Landscape Association in Orlando, doesn’t think the newest challenge is on the scale of citrus canker but says steps need to be taken.
“While the disease is a challenge, proper treatments and management help,” he said.
There is an antibiotic injection that helps prevent Texas Phoenix Palm Decline. But administering it can cost $100 a year and has not been uniformly successful in saving trees already infected.
When the disease strikes, a palm’s limbs will hang limply and its fronds will look brittle and brown. A dead spear leaf, the palm’s youngest leaf, indicates impending doom.
Homeowners don’t usually notice a problem until the spear leaf is dead, and the time for intervention has passed. But if treatment begins soon after a fruit drop or leaf tips start to brown, the plant might be saved with medicine.
It joins lethal yellowing and Ganoderma butt rot as threats to palm trees that have appeared in the past several decades. The war against the new marauder is taking place in Davie, at the University of Florida’s Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center.
Their study of samples has determined which bacteria is responsible for the disease and how it gets into the tree from insects. An entomologist has just been hired to help determine which insect is spreading it.
“There’s still a lot we don’t know about this,” said professor
Monica Elliott, co-director of the UF center.
The threat could be on the scale of lethal yellowing in the 1970s, when about 75 percent of Miami-Dade County’s coconut palms were destroyed, Elliott said.
And that means the potential economic loss is huge, said James Miller of JP Miller & Sons Services, a Deerfield Beach pest control company.
“The date palms are all over the place and are very expensive,” he said.
Researchers believe the disease has felled thousands of trees statewide, but total numbers are difficult to come by because many were cut down and mulched before the cause of death was determined.
Two years ago, the UF scientists realized the disease was on their doorstep, taking down a stand of 30-year-old Sabal palms, also called cabbage palms, right in front of the center’s Davie office.
“One day, I was looking out and said, ‘You know, that Sabal palm doesn’t look very good,’ ” Elliot said.
She believes the outbreak happened soon after the area was re-sodded.
She wouldn’t advise homeowners to stop planting palms because of this newest threat, but she does have some advice.
“Don’t plant all of the same thing,” she said. “Diversity is better.”