As far as Joseph Gittleman, the head of New York’s Asian-long-horned-beetle eradication program, can tell, the creature first appeared on American soil in 1996, in the yard of a Brooklyn resident named Ingram Carner. When mysterious holes first appeared in twenty of his Norway maples, Carner assumed that teenagers had drilled them as a prank. One day, he noticed a large, black beetle with white spots clambering out of one of the cavities, waving its horn-like antennas. Carner called the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. “They thought he was a crazy old man,” Gittleman said.
Eventually, a Cornell University scientist identified the insect as an Asian long-horned beetle, which Gittleman says probably travelled to the U.S. the old-fashioned way: as a stowaway on a ship. The beetle grows to be an inch to an inch and a half long, with irregular white spots on its shiny black body. It has long, black-and-white striped antennae, and feasts on maple, horse chestnut, elm, willow, birch, poplar, and ash trees. The adult females tunnel into the trunk and lay eggs; the larvae destroy the tree by munching the wood into a pulp, turning the inside of the tree into a soggy mush and leaving its vascular system to rot.
Over the past eighteen years, the beetles have spread from Brooklyn to the rest of New York City, and then to Long Island, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Ohio. Because the adults tend to stay in a confined area during their short lifespan—two hundred and seventy-six square meters on average—and because the larvae incubate all winter, they are easier to eradicate than other invasive species. Yet they have managed to kill roughly eighty thousand trees in the U.S. Left unchecked, they could kill millions more, affecting bird habitats and blighting landscapes in many parts of the country. According to researchers at Cornell University, invasive species like the Asian long-horned beetle cost the United States more than a hundred and thirty-seven billion dollars per year.
A growing horde of scientists like Gittleman—a bearded sixty-three-year-old biologist, who dresses in earth-tone park ranger fatigues, black boots and square-frame glasses—battle the influx. He works for the Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, and he and his sixty-seven-member team occupy a long, narrow space in a suburban strip mall in Amityville, New York. They keep the beetles they find in jars and plastic bags in a freezer. There is a “wood room,” with barrels full of hole-ridden tree limbs; scientists study tree rings to determine when the bugs first infested the tree and how they travelled inside.
Gittleman led me past messy cubicles belonging to U.S.D.A. scientists and into a small conference room—a war room, really, with maps on the walls and bulletin boards all around. On one map, Gittleman traced lines that show how infested trees spread last August to fifty square miles of southern Long Island this past summer, from twenty-five in July. As a result, the New York-area quarantine—land that agents are scouring in order to rid it of infested trees—will soon cover a hundred and thirty-six square miles. Another map showed the precise location of each infected tree; it was covered in crimson dots of varying shapes and patterns, as though it had a case of chicken pox. Although his team successfully eradicated the bugs from Manhattan, Staten Island, and most of Long Island, locals reported new sightings in Farmingdale in July. Since then, the beetles have infested over three hundred new trees. “We know we’ll have many, many more,” Gittleman said.
Driving through corporate office parks in the quarantined areas near Farmingdale, Gittleman pointed out some maple trees, whose leaves were turning red and yellow. Large pink X’s were painted on the trunks, and yellow “CAUTION” tape was wrapped around them. Some trees had government notices nailed to their bark, warning people not to bother the tree before the scheduled removal. One fifteen-year-old Crimson King Norway maple in Farmingdale was pockmarked with dozens, if not hundreds, of dark spots—entry points where a female beetle burrowed in during the summer and laid eggs, which are now larvae, eating away at the heart of the tree. “The inside of this tree, by next year, will look like Swiss cheese,” Gittleman said. “Like it was machine-gunned.” With a pocket-knife, Gittleman sawed away at the bark, cutting a square patch around one of the entry points. Peeling back the bark, he showed me where the larvae is living amid a wet, dark pulp that looked like chewing tobacco.
U.S. government and environmental groups are increasingly embracing strategies of crowdsourcing and promoting vigilantism in attempting to remove the beetles and other invasive species. The menu of defensive tactics includes launching multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns to raise awareness; encouraging competitive behavior (as in the case of tournaments for spearing lionfish); creating businesses that promote eradication (as some have tried with exporting Asian carp back to Asia); holding international conferences of scientists and trade officials; and establishing rules regarding trade and inspection, in order to prevent more species from crossing oceans. Experts say that inspection and trade rules are the most effective deterrent, but they are opposed by some animal-rights lobbyists.
The Department of Agriculture is sponsoring a three-million-dollar campaign on the East Coast, featuring billboards and an online drive that encourages citizens to “Get out there and get hunting!” Gittleman says “as long as we know where the beetles are, we can take care of them” and that the department finds about ninety per cent of new infestations through citizen tips. In 2011, he awarded Ingram Carner a certificate of appreciation for his vigilance. The U.S.D.A.’s press release declared, “Carner isn’t a trained naturalist, botanist or entomologist—he’s a citizen with a sharp eye who knew something was amiss.”
Paul Glader, a journalist and a former Wall Street Journal reporter, teaches journalism at The King’s College in New York City.
Above: a female Asian long-horned beetle. Photograph by Barbara Strnadova/Getty.
