![]() ![]() But now it also serves as a living laboratory to test a variety of methods for controlling the emerald ash borer, an iridescent green beetle native to China that has killed hundreds of millions of ash trees in the eastern and central United States and in Ontario and Quebec. The forest, which consists primarily of white ash and red maple, is owned by the nearby city of Pittsfield to protect its public drinking-water supply. ![]() And staring into the canopy, they observed that many of the trees were in the early stages of decline. They quickly noted the small holes made in some trunks by foraging woodpeckers and distinguished them from the even smaller holes made by wood-boring beetles. The mixed hardwood forest on the edge of the town of Dalton in western Massachusetts looks healthy to the untrained eye, but the researchers from the University of Massachusetts who visited the site every few weeks last summer are anything but untrained. Photo courtesy of Jian Duan/USDA ARS Beneficial Insects Introduction Research Unit. Spathius galinae, native to Russia, is a parasitoid of emerald ash borer that has been approved for release to help control the invasive beetle here in the US. ![]()
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