Transcript:

music
ambience: Ships’ Horn

Traveling to American ports from far off countries, looking for new opportunities. Sounds like the pursuit of the American dream. Well, maybe not. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet. Scores of invasive insects arrive at our ports daily in the holds of cargo ships. It’s a growing problem that has wide reaching consequences. David Williams is an entomologist at the US Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Survey. His job is to study these new insect arrivals and figure out ways to eradicate, or at least control, these invasive species.

“Well, we’ve done a tremendous amount of international trade and travel in the last 20 years or so and there’s been a lot of shipping of parts obviously from other parts of the world to the US and all over the world for that matter. And a lot of it has involved containers that contain solid wood packing materials as we call it. And, as a result, in the last 15-20 years we’ve seen kind of an increase in the interceptions of wood boring insects, insects that would live inside this solid-wood packing material. So, a number of the more important pests, I would say, things that attack forest trees or urban trees, have been wood boring pests that have come in in this way. So I’m talking about Asian Long Horned Beetle, Emerald Ash Borer is certainly another one. There’s another insect in the Midwest called the Pine Shoot Beetle, and there are several others. Well, I think people should be concerned about invasive species because we have a lot of precious forest resources here, a lot of native trees that may be especially vulnerable to these foreign invaders because they don’t have any sort of co-evolved resistance mechanisms, so that they tend to be more likely to be damaged, or killed than trees in the insect’s place of origin.”

Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.

music