CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Redbays wilt away in Ocean Woods as a foreign beetle has its way with the usually graceful tree.
The 300-home community in Cape Canaveral already has had to remove a few dozen dead redbays. Now residents worry about the expense, should hundreds more of the trees that shade the 40-acre community perish from the Asian ambrosia beetle?s deadly fungus injections.
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?It happens almost overnight. It?s strange,? Eric Bartels told Local 6 news partner Florida Today regarding the dying redbays near his home in Ocean Woods.
The redbay ambrosia beetle injects trees with a foreign fungus from its mouth. The fungus is believed to have arrived with the beetle, first detected in the United States in 2002 in a survey trap near Savannah, Ga. As with other invasive wood-boring beetles, this one likely arrived in crates or pallets not properly treated before export.
Impacts of a redbay demise could send ripples through the food chain. Its seeds and foliage are important food for songbirds, turkeys, quail, deer, black bear and other wildlife. Redbays also provide shade for countless backyards statewide. And Florida agriculture officials fear avocado trees could be the beetle?s next major victims, because they belong to the same family as redbays. But so far, science and government have yet to discover anything that can stop the beetle.
Between 18 and 22 months, more than 90 percent of the redbay trees are dead once infected by the beetle.
The wilting disease it causes first showed up in Brevard in 2007, in the county?s southern reaches, and now runs roughshod countywide.
The beetle recently cast its evil spell on the Enchanted Forest in Titusville, the premier park of Brevard?s Environmentally Endangered Lands program. Up to half the redbays on the 470-acre park are already dying. Officials first noticed them browning just six months ago. Now, they?re growing more than a dozen redbays in a greenhouse, in hopes of one day replanting.
?Right now, they don?t really have a cure besides pumping some kind of pesticide into the tree, but that?s not really feasible,? said Xavier des Seguin des Hons, land manager for the EEL program?s north region. There are so many trees to treat, he said, it would be too time-consuming and expensive.
Nor is state money available for removing dying redbays in residential areas, said Mark Fagan, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Agriculture.
?We don?t actually do the removal of these redbays,? Fagan said. ?We got out of the tree-removal business in January 2006, when the canker removal program was terminated,? he said of a disease that ravages citrus trees.
Removing redbays wouldn?t prevent spread of the disease, anyway, because the beetles would just fly elsewhere to infest new areas.
Fagan said state agriculture and University of Florida researchers are experimenting with various ways of killing the beetle, without damaging avocados, a more than $11 million crop annually in Florida.
The beetle?s fungus has killed avocado trees in Jacksonville, but state agriculture officials aren?t sure of the potential impact on South Florida?s avocado crop.
They worry because the beetle only targets older, dying trees in its Asian homeland, but appears more ambitious here.
?It doesn?t seem to have a rhyme or reason as far as that goes,? said Nichole Perna, assistant land manager with EEL?s Barrier Island Center in South Brevard, where the disease killed about 85 percent of the redbays within a few years. The rest are hanging on.
?The first year to two years was when the impact was pretty great,? Perna said. ?We do have a small percentage of them remaining.?
Brown, dying redbays line long stretches of Interstate 95 from Florida to South Carolina. Their leaves droop and wilt, changing from reddish to purplish and ultimately brown. Peeling away the bark reveals blackish, discolored sapwood. The beetle leaves piles of fine sawdust on the bark as it bores into the tree.
Biologists aren?t sure whether the beetle and its associated fungus can wipe out redbays completely or how far it will spread. The beetle has been known to also attack sassafras, pondberry and pondspice.
But the wilt disease also spreads by transport of infested firewood, logs and plants. So the Florida Division of Agriculture and Consumer Services wants campers, hunters and others to burn, bury or chip redbay wood, or simply let it dry out in place instead of transporting it across county or state lines. People also are being asked not to move firewood across county or state lines to stop the spread of the laurel wilt fungus that the beetle deposits under the bark.
Federal agriculture officials also want residents to gather seeds of the redbay tree to preserve its genes in case it gets wiped out.
Increasing globalization could bring more beetle infestations in the next decade, researchers say. A study published last month by the University of California-Santa Barbara and several other universities found boring insects such as the redbay ambrosia and Asian longhorned beetle cause $1.7 billion in local government expenditures nationwide and $830 million in lost residential property values. They predict a 32 percent chance that another highly destructive borer species will invade the U.S. in the next 10 years.
In the meantime, Bartels hopes for some relief for the redbays in Ocean Woods.
?This thing is pervasive. It?s all over, all up and down (State Road) A1A in our area,? he said.