Natural History Wanderings

Bay Nature  reports

The squiggly grooves on dead logs are the telltale traces of bark beetles, which shape the lives and deaths of stressed-out trees.

Bark beetles get a bad rap because when their larvae nibble all the way around a tree’s inner bark, they cut off its ability to shuttle water and nutrients, and the tree withers and dies. These beetles (at least the native species) are just the last straw—they usually only infest frail, diseased, or already dead trees. But even healthy trees become susceptible when stressed by drought, wildfire, or overcrowding. During the 2014-2017 drought, bark beetles killed over 100 million trees in California, and over the past three decades, more trees in the western U.S. were killed by beetles than by wildfire.

Read article at  Don’t Blame the Bark Beetles—Bay Nature Magazine