Researchers boggled by bark beetle
Idaho scientists seek to understand the bugs' infestation
The 29-year-old Williams is experimenting with the beetles, smaller than Lincoln's head on a penny, to learn the secrets of why they attack the region's conifers.
Watching a Douglas fir bark beetle fly his lonely arc in the BSU lab — there's a dab of contact cement on the dark beetle's backside linking it to the rod — Williams says the 263 insects he recorded on computer flew 715 miles over 709 hours. His average beetle lost 0.75 mg of fat on its journey to nowhere.
"I don't even want to think of the hours I've spent weighing them," Williams said.
Across the Western United States and Canada, bark beetles similar to Williams' have killed tens of millions of forest acres, threatening not only the timber industry but boosting the incidence of massive wildfires. The Potato fire in Idaho's Rocky Mountains has been burning in beetle-killed timber since July 27, for instance, and has cost taxpayers some $8 million.
This is why the U.S. Forest Service paid Williams and Ian Robertson, a BSU biology professor, $70,000 to put their beetles on "flymills." It hopes the knowledge gained will help improve forest management, as drought and climate change make the region's trees more susceptible to insect destruction.
"The question we're asking is, 'Why be the first beetle to attack a live tree?"' Robertson said. "Think about it like landing on a beach at D-Day: It's riskier to be in the first wave."
His hypothesis: Weaker beetles would be more likely to engage in risky behavior. So he gave Williams the job of flying the critters stored inside frozen two-foot sections of Douglas fir, recording their fat loss, and then unleashing them on selected trees in the Boise National Forest to see how quickly they start chowing down.
The subject of his experiments are ancient, having been in Earth's forests for 200 million years. Worldwide, there are 600 different species, each feasting on a specific tree species.
Ordinarily, they're a necessary evil, helping forests renew by attacking weak trees, leaving them to rot and provide nutrients for a new generation.
Sometimes, however, the balance between beetle and tree goes awry and giant swaths of forests are attacked by millions of boring arthropods in an all-you-can-eat feeding frenzy.
Around Flagstaff, Ariz., some 90 percent of ponderosa pine in drought-stricken forests have fallen victim to mountain pine beetles, Williams said. Between 1950 and 1969 in Oregon and Washington, four Douglas fir beetle outbreaks killed enough wood for a 58-foot-wide path circling the globe, according to the Forest Service.
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