The Southern pine beetle, scourge of pitch pine forests, has traveled North into New England thanks to increasingly mild winters, according to the New York Times.
The Southern pine beetle, scourge of pitch pine forests, has traveled North into New England thanks to increasingly mild winters, according to the New York Times.
The beetle typically dies if temperatures sink to 8 degrees Fahrenheit. Despite an unusually cold Valentine’s Day in the region, winter never stayed cold enough long enough to wipe out the beetles. In fact, this winter was the warmest on record in parts of New England, according to the Times.
Scientists like Claire Rutledge, a researcher with Connecticut’s Agricultural Experiment Station, are worried what that means for the beetle’s spread next season. New England was once considered too cold for the rice-sized beetles to survive. But today, the front line of the beetle’s Northward march is a 200-mile stretch of land between central Long Island, N.Y., and Cape Code, Mass.
“When I heard they caught a live beetle in Massachusetts,” Rutledge told the Times, “that really freaked me out.”
The beetles, she said, can wipe out thousands of trees in a season. Since its discovery in New Jersey in 2002, it has destroyed more than 30,000 acres of pitch pine forest. The beetle has infested 8,000 acres in Long Island since it was found in 2014.
A widespread infestation in New England could leave only a few pitch pines in the region, Matthew Ayres, a Southern pine beetle researcher at Dartmouth College, told the Times. He said he could imagine the beetles infiltrating the Great Lakes states and Canada, as well.
“It’s an example of something that’s happening all over the world,” he said. “It’s old pests in new places, and with that comes a whole new set of challenges.”
