"Maze's two kids, released from camp and eager to see what their dad was doing with a hatchet in the school parking lot, ran toward him. He told them to watch for a shiny green beetle. Just then, an insect landed on his son's hand. The family stared at the creature: slender body hardly larger than a grain of rice; two bulbous eyes; iridescent shell shimmering emerald-green in the afternoon sun."
"The beetle flew off, vanishing into the distance, and Maze turned back to the tree. There, he found another, this one dead and wedged in a hole in the bark. "I don't want to be hyperbolic about it, but I felt terrible," he told me. "I mean, just the worst feeling." Maze had never seen this particular insect in Oregon, but he recognized it immediately; he'd been expecting it for years."
In June 2022, Dominic Maze, a biologist with the city of Portland, noticed numerous ash trees in a Forest Grove school parking lot with leafless crowns and new shoots at their bases. He scraped a bark split and discovered snaking larval tunnels under the bark, signs of severe infestation. A small iridescent green beetle, slender and about the size of a grain of rice, landed on his son's hand and then flew away. He later found a dead beetle lodged in the bark and identified the insect as the emerald ash borer, an invasive pest native to northeastern Asia that was first detected in the United States in Michigan in the early 2000s after unexpected ash tree die-offs.
Read at High Country News
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]