#60 Empire of the Beetle

202 pages, by Andrew Nikiforuk

       I happened upon this book in my last saunter around a Barnes and Noble.  The subject was intriguing, so I purchased it without prior knowledge of the book or having read one review.  It was about the Mountain Pine Beetles that are decimating spruce, lodgepole pines, and whitebark pines all over western North America.  This must have been the first printing, as at times the grammar was awkward, and sentence fragments appeared here and there.  For example, here is one of my favorite fragments: For some species, that includes keeping the gallery free of frass, chewed-up wood mixed with beetle shit (35).  Other places articles were missing.  At one point information was wrong, such as "the Great Yellowstone Fire of 1994" (114), which was actually in 1988.  And most grievous of all were the terrible similes throughout the book that were like a group of fatties converging on free ice cream.  The similes never stopped.  One must wonder how long the vacation was for the editor to allow such an egregious crime against literature to happen.

Despite the poor presentation, the substance of the book was quite good.  The little Mountain Pine Beetle (MPB) has been destroying trees on an epic scale since the 70s, starting in Kenai, Alaska and then moving to BC, Cananda.  What I did not know is that the beetle uses certain fungi to accomplish this task.  It holds these fungi in its mouth and when the swarm finds an acceptable pine tree it uses the fungi to break down the phloem in the tree and then eats a nice little path underneath the bark.  It takes about 600 MPBs to kill one tree by effectively eating around the whole phloem and girdling the tree.

Climate change is suspected of aiding this tiny beetle (the size of a grain of rice) in becoming more voracious.  Normally there would be one mating a year, but with higher temperatures and longer seasons the MPB can mate twice a year creating bigger swarms more often.  These swarms descend on a lodgepole forest and kill everything.  Normally they act as nature's method of thinning the forest by eating mature trees whose defenses are not as robust as younger trees, but recently the MPB has been known to kill young trees as well.  This is scary as no tree is safe.  Canada and the US have tried to stop these beetles repeatedly but nothing they've done has worked, including letting logging industries come in and clear cut huge swathes of land.  The message in the book is to allow the beetle to come through and renew the forest, as this is a natural part of the forest cycle.  The main reason it is so bad now is because of fire suppression has created an unnatural old forest growth throughout the northwest area.

Yeah it is aggravating watching a beautiful whitebark pine forest getting eaten, but it will be back in another 200 years for future generations to enjoy.  This is just part of the natural cycle.