the destructive pests were agitated by certain sounds<\/a>, NAU forest researchers wondered whether these sounds could be used to change bark beetle behavior.<\/p>\nSo, on a radio in a lab at NAU, Dunn and forest researchers are playing all beetles, all the time.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe sound is very similar to just scraping your fingers across the surface of a phonograph record,\u201d Dunn said. \u201cThe beetles have grooves in their body parts. They rub them together to create rhythmic, percussive sounds.\u201d<\/p>\n
Scientists hear this as a symphony of destruction. \u201cThey kind of sound like an angry squirrel,\u201d said NAU entomology professor\u00a0Rich Hofstetter<\/strong>. \u201cThey make clicking and scratching sounds as they chew through the wood or attract mates.\u201d<\/p>\nAll that racket is going on inside millions of overcrowded and drought-stressed trees across the West. The dehydrated pine trees can\u2019t create enough resin to push all the bugs out, so creatures the size of a grain of rice are killing entire forests by tunneling through the phloem, or living tissue of the trees.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt takes hundreds of years to build a forest,” Hofstetter said. “Ponderosa pines are slow-growing trees. They\u2019re actually really well defended typically, but it can take just weeks, sometimes days, for a tree to die.”<\/p>\n
Researchers with NAU’s Ecological Restoration Institute say our pine forests evolved naturally with insects like bark beetles that help decompose weak trees. \u201cOur western forests now are crowded with thin, sickly trees that are competing against each other for nutrients,\u201d said ecologist\u00a0Mike Stoddard<\/strong>. \u201cWith predictions of a warmer, dryer West in the long-term forecast, our unhealthy forests are likely to become even more susceptible to unprecedented insect infestations.\u201d<\/p>\nFoot soldiers in the bark beetle battle, Hofstetter and forestry research assistant\u00a0Reagan McGuire\u00a0<\/strong>recruited Dunn to help them listen to the trees and record the chatter from the enemy under the bark.<\/p>\n\u201cThese insects are sensitive to sound,\u201d Dunn said. \u201cSound is a part of how they go about sensing and organizing their world and we\u2019re interfering with that.\u201d<\/p>\n
They are interfering by introducing a cacophony of bark beetle sounds. \u201cWe use several different species and a combination of aggression and courtship calls,\u201d Hofstetter said. \u201cIt\u2019s our hope to confuse them and stop their ability to reproduce.\u201d<\/p>\n
Using tiny speakers, like the kind you\u2019d find in a musical Hallmark greeting card, the scientists altered the sounds to engage in a sort of sonic warfare with the pests.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we play the sounds, it\u2019s very clear the creatures don\u2019t want to be where they are. They become very agitated. The kinds of behavior that have been induced include tunneling in circles, ignoring each other or tearing each other apart,\u201d Dunn said. \u201cIf they can\u2019t go about their normal business, the reproductive cycle collapses.\u201d<\/p>\n
The scientists used 28 bark beetle couples in an experiment. Fourteen couples were blasted with the mutated beetle sounds; 14 were not.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe experiment was tremendously successful,\u201d McGuire said. \u201cThe control couples produced 200 eggs in tunnels 15 to 30 centimeters long, the kind of tunnel capable of killing a tree. The 14 sound couples produced only one egg collectively and their tunnels were short, only a few centimeters long.\u201d<\/p>\n
These scientists appear to have struck the right chord with their acoustic chaos. They are working on a patent to produce a product that will protect individual trees without the use of pesticides. Now their challenge is keeping the beetles from entering the trees in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Forest scientists at Northern Arizona University, desperate to stop the massive devastation from bark beetle infestation, have recruited a powerful and unconventional force to fight this fierce little bug\u2014Santa Fe musician and composer David Dunn. Dunn hears beauty in the beetles and has even released a bark beetle CD,\u00a0The Sound of Light in Trees.\u00a0With his…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":13876,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research-academics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13875\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}