Nikiforuk speaks for the beetles

Author Andrew Nikiforuk
C. Davis photo

Chris Davis

Canadian journalist Andrew Nikiforuk appeared at Lundbreck Hall last night, November 30, to give a presentation based upon his newest book, "Empire of the Beetle: How human folly and a tiny bug are killing North America's great forests", which was short-listed for the Governor General's Award for Literary Non-Fiction. The event was attended by about 50 interested people. Nikiforuk lives in Calgary and maintains a property in the Porcupine Hills, north and west of Pincher Creek.
Nikiforuk has spoken at various other public meetings in the area, including "Sour gas and your community" at Cowley Hall, and a highly publicized debate about the oilsands with Ezra Levant in Calgary last year.

The admission price and profits from book sales at the event went towards the stewardship efforts of the Livingstone Landowners Group.


After a brief introduction by Sid Marty and Janet Barkwith, Nikiforuk launched into an often entertaining dissertation on the history of the beetles, their habits, and their ongoing effects on North American forests, interspersed with tales of the many ways people have failed to properly deal with them.  He's an unassuming speaker who managed to remain quite engaging throughout a long and complicated dissertation.

"There are more species of bark beetles on all the planet than there are mammals," said Nikiforuk in his preamble.  "Not only that, they have been on the planet for 350 million years or longer.  They have co-evolved with continents.  They're all shaped like bullets, and that's how they perform. Watching a swarm of bark beetles attack a tree is like watching a tree being hit by 500 to 1000 bullets over a period of two or three hours."

Nikiforuk said beetles were Mother Nature's original tree engineers, the first foresters.  Each have specific jobs, but "Largely their job is to take out large, diseased, aging trees," said Nikiforuk.  "They are the guys that take care of the forest."

Tree Killer Clan
The  beetle clan Dendroctonus, called "Tree Killers", take out entire forests.  "Their job is to renew an entire aging forest.  The mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) is a member of this clan," explained Nikiforuk.  "They are terrible fliers, but they can travel 300 kilometres in distance if they catch the right wind draft.  They can take down a 120 foot spruce or pine in the space of a couple of hours."

Major epidemics 

"They're (various species of beetle) all part of an extraordinary outbreak over the last few decades, where these explosions of bark beetles throughout the Rocky Mountain west, and from Alaska all the way down to New Mexico have taken out more than 30 billion trees," said Nikiforuk, comparing the situation to the Rocky Mountain locust (Melanoplus spretus) infestation that devastated much of the western half of the United States and some western portions of Canada in the late 19th century.

Nikiforuk said 15 to 20 different species of bark beetles are involved in the present mass forest die-off.   "In Alberta we're in the process still of a massive infestation that is very much part of the British Columbia outbreak, in the Rocky Mountain forest, where the beetles have moved into boreal forest and into jack pine and are on their way to Labrador."

"There is probably no creature on the planet that can change the landscape as fast as us, not even the bark beetles," he added as a caution.

According to Nikiforuk, beetles are "the only insects on the planet that live inside the bark of a living tree."  He said trees were increasingly stressed from the effects of a warming environment, becoming particularly susceptible.

Pine Beetle packs

Nikiforuk explained in some detail how pine beetles worked in packs to bring down trees.  "The female is called a pioneer." he said. "The female picks the tree, scientist suspect she is picking  a drought-stressed tree.  She is picking a wounded plant, or one that has some flaws or some inabilities to mount a good defence.   She takes hydrocarbons from the tree, and uses that to  fart out a chemical perfume that signals a mass attack.  As soon as other beetles smell that chemical signal, the mass attack begins, and hundreds of other beetles will hit the tree, all within a matter of hours.  It really is like watching a pack of wolves taking down a moose.  It's all over in the space of two or three hours, essentially overwhelming the tree's defences."

"Once the tree is down then the beetles begin to build their galleries, very elaborate galleries, they have mating rituals, and calls that they perform, and then, after this whole warrior thing, then they become farmers. What they are really doing inside the tree is farming a fungus to feed their young...this fungus is critical for the development of larvae.  That's just the pine beetle."

Southern Pine Beetle

Nikiforuk said southern pine beetles (Dendroctonus frontalis Zimmermann), found in the southern United States, attack only trees struck by lightning.  As a result of the lightning strike, the tree's defences are knocked out, making it an easy target.  According to Nikiforuk, they then build their population and snake their way through the forest.

"The southern pine beetle is an extraordinary character," he said, calling them a "biological bus".  They carry "roundworms, nematodes, bacteria, probably ten or twenty species of fungi, and 20 to 30 kinds of mites.  This bus is loaded."   He explained that the mites can be problematic to the southern pine beetles.  One particular mite "carries a fungus antagonistic to the fungus the beetles carry to feed their young."  As a biological response to this threat, the southern pine beetles have a built-in compartment to carry fungus for farming in the tree.  They carry a bacteria that they coat their galleries with to protect from the antagonistic fungus, to protect their fungal environment (farm).

"Blue stained fungus is like blood on the battlefield... what kills the tree is the girdling of the tree by the beetles themselves," he explained, debunking a popular myth.

Love me do

Nikiforuk called the beetles "The world's garbagemen," explaining they "take care of plant litter, dead trees, dead animals, dung piles, you name it and beetles are doing it."

He said human culture used to be much more aware of their role in our ecology, and posits we learned farming techniques by observing them, which isn't a big stretch considering how much longer they've been at it.

"When we were still close to the land, we celebrated beetles in poems, in proverbs, we had prayers to beetles, we had beetles in medicine,  we had beetles in soups, we drew wonderful art about beetles, women used beetles as a form of jewellery, beetles were part of every part of human existence," he said.

He told the story of the importing of European cows to Australia in the early 19th century, which had none prior to white colonization.
"We introduced the cattle but we forgot to introduce the dung beetles that go with the cattle," explained Nikiforuk. Cows come of course with big wet cow patties, for which the Australian ecosystem at the time had no method for dealing with.  This resulted in a big, stinking mess, which was solved by the introduction of dung beetles, which are particularly good of course at recycling dung.

Nikiforuk said that nature loves redundancy.  If a fire doesn't occur to allow forests to renew, the beetle fills the gap. "The process of renewal will happen."

"After they attack a forest, it renews."

Symbiotic relationship between mountain pine beetles and Lodgepole pine 

Nikiforuk extolled "A remarkable relationship between one insect and one species of plant," the one that exists between mountain pine beetles and lodgepole pine trees.

"For tens of thousands of years mountain pine beetles and Lodgepole pine have worked together," he said.  "When a lodgepole pine reaches maturity around 80 to 120 years of age they slowly let down their defences in anticipation of a beetle attack that will take them out and begin the process of renewal in the lodgepole forest."

He said studies have shown that new Lodgepole pin trees sequester more carbon than old trees, benefiting the atmosphere.

Beetles ignored until they affected previously ignored tree stock

Nikiforuk said Lodgpole pines received little attention from loggers  until after Douglas fir and Spruce was depleted in the interior of British Columbia.  Then these trees "which we considered weeds, actually made a good two by four."

He said that fire suppression techniques led inevitably to an increase of Lodgeople pine, creating "an incredible smorgasbord for beetles."

Climate change encourages beetle population explosion

 "Then we changed the climate. We ramped up the thermostat such that minus 40 degree winters disappeared from the centre of BC for more than ten to twenty years, and the summers got hotter, and the trees got drought stressed, and then we set ourselves up for a perfect storm of beetles."

"Climate change was the trigger, not the cause.  It allowed more beetles to survive the winter, allowed the beetles to add more reproductive cycles."

"At the same time climate change had a really dramatic effect on the trees in that it really weakened these trees."

Government bungling

Nikiforuk leveled some scorn at the Federal government, who he says "trashed" an ongoing survey at the same time as the BC beetle outbreak, resulting, he says, in 20,000 outbreaks with no real way to monitor how big it was.  "It wouldn't have changed the outcome at all but it might have changed the strategy we used to deal with it," he said.  In that event, beetles attacked younger trees,  something entymologists had never seen before "and probably will never see again."

New sounds from the Beetles - "In the pines..."

Nikiforuk next discussed the work of Santa Fe's David Dunn, who created special equipment to record the sounds created by bark beetles infesting the native Pinyon pine there.  Dunn created a CD from his recordings, called "The Sound of Light and Trees."

(click here for sound samples)

Dunn teamed up with anthropology student Reagan McGuire and assistant professor Richard Hofstetter of Northern Arizona University to experiment with using these sounds against the beetles.  Playing them back at the beetles produced fascinating results.

According to a Denver Post article about the experiment, "They attack one another, scamper in circles rather than straight lines and have tried to gnaw their way through Plexiglas covering a cross section of a tree in a lab in Flagstaff, Ariz."  Mating behaviors were also disrupted.  Mating would occur as normal, and then after a couple of hours the male would exhibit unnatural behavior, chewing the female to pieces.

Earlier sonic attempts apparently included using the voice of Rush Limbaugh, which annoyed the humans but not the beetles.

The scientists have great hopes of using some version of this technique to reduce the onslaught of the beetles.

Techniques that have failed, according to Nikiforuk, include burning affected trees, which just causes the beetles to move on, and logging and removing affected trees, which has the tendency to spread the beetles over a larger area.

The future

"The future is going to be more volatile, particularly in our forests," said Nikiforuk, who showed computer-models of projected future infestations.

"How far they will go, nobody knows," he said, indicating that a couple of cold winters would help a lot.  The beetles are susceptible to sustained cold, with the magic number being somewhere between 30 and 40 degrees below zero.

Notable quotes:

"Mother nature loves volatility, we love stability."

"Watching your trees die before your very eyes is an unpleasant experience."

"We're trying to manage forests without even knowing what's really going on."


Nikiforuk concluded his presentation with a brief question and answer session, and stuck around to sign copies of his book.  There is a couple of links below for those that wish to order it online.


Andrew Nikiforuk

Awards:
2002 Governor General's Award for "Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig’s War Against Oil"
2009 Winner, The City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize, for "Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent".
2009 First Place, The Society of Environmental Journalists, "Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent".
2009 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award for "Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent"

Books:

• Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America's Great Forests, Greystone Books, August 2011.
• Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, Greystone Books, April 2010.
• Pumped: Everyone's Guide to the Oil Patch (with David Finch), 2007.
• Pandemonium: Bird Flu, mad Cow Disease and Other Biological Plagues of the 21st Century, Viking Canada (AHC).
• Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig's War Against Big Oil, Macfarlane, Walter & Ross, 2002.
• School's Out: The Catastrophe in Public Education and What We can Do About It, Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1993.
• Fourth Horseman: A Short History of Epidemics, Plagues, Famines & Other Scourges, Viking Canada, 1991.

Other work:

• 1990 - Toronto Star Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy to study AIDS and the failure of public health policy.
• Late 1990s - Worked for the Calgary Herald investigating the social and ecological impacts of intensive livestock industries and the legacy of northern uranium mining.
• 2004 - Writer, public policy position papers on water diversion in the Great Lakes.
• 2007 - Writer for the Program on Water Issues at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre.
• 2010 - Writer in residence at The Tyee.
• Column for the Alberta CBC.
• Magazine columns: Saturday Night, Maclean’s, Canadian Business, Chatelaine, Equinox, Canadian Family, The Walrus, The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business, Chatelaine, the Georgia Straight, and Harrowsmith.

Relevant links:
www.andrewnikiforuk.com
thetyee.ca
www.livingstonelandowners.net
The Green Interview
A Public Tarring
The criminal prosecution and capital punishment of animals
David Dunn - The Sound of Light in Trees
Denver Post story about using sound against beetles

Online book purchases:
Chapters
Amazon

Andrew Nikiforuk, the fifth Beetle
C. Davis photo