Less than 100 yards away, Potter spotted two more trees just starting to show damage. Most of the affected trees in this community have been tagged and are continually monitored. The pair scanned the tree tops for leaves that have been snipped in an inverted V-shape - a sign of beetle damage. The former military housing community is filled with coconut trees. On a recent Friday, team leaders Chad Goldstein and Zachary Potter headed out on their daily rounds to Iroquois Point, just across the harbor from beetle ground zero at Pearl Harbor. So far, they’ve put up 2,700 beetle traps across Oahu and surveyed more than 100,000 trees. Field teams check trees, set up traps and monitor mulch piles for signs of beetle larvae. “If somebody is coming to buy a property in Hawaii, they will expect nice palm trees,” says Curtiss, an entomologist with the plant pest control branch of Hawaii’s Department of Agriculture.Ĭurtiss leads a group of about 40 people charged with eradicating the bug. The coconut tree is depicted in the ancient hula, and in some neighborhoods, every other house has a palm tree growing in the front yard. The team's research has been published in Virus Research, the Journal of Virology and Current Research in Insect Science.The urgency to address the problem is both cultural and financial. "And everything we're finding in the Pacific islands may later be critical to managing the beetle here in Australia." "It's imperative that Australian scientists help our neighboring countries in the Pacific to tackle their emerging pests and diseases. "The coconut rhinoceros beetle remains a serious threat to livelihoods across Pacific islands, where the coconut tree remains their 'tree of life," providing essential resources like food, copra, building materials and coastal protection for five million vulnerable people," he said. Etebari said investing in research and new control methods was vital, not only for Australia's prosperity, but for humanitarian reasons. "We know the virus doesn't kill the beetles outright, but probably affects the number of eggs a female lays and changes beetle behavior, for example how far infected beetles can fly, so we need to explore these important aspects of the interaction too."ĭr. "The next step will be finding out how these virus variations behave in these different beetles, and how this can be used to control them. "This presents us with a complex problem: multiple types of beetles and beetle-controlling virus. "Similar to how scientists spot different strains of COVID-19, we are also detecting variations in the beetle virus," Professor Furlong said. The beetles all look alike, but the molecular tests show they are different. "And there are different populations of the beetle that we didn't recognize previously-in the Solomon Islands for example, there are three populations of the beetle, and they are interbreeding." "We found that there have been several new waves of beetle invasions, not only one as we first expected," Professor Furlong said. UQ's Professor Michael Furlong said the research team investigated the beetle's population genetics and the incidence of the virus in specimens collected in Fiji, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea (PNG), Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Vanuatu and the Philippines. "If they spread to Australia, garden palms would be at risk, along with the country's emerging date industry, coconuts, oil palms, and many other palms, both wild in the forests and ornamental," Dr. In the last few years, the pest has spread to many South Pacific islands, including islands in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, causing severe agricultural and economic damage. "It seems that they are now unshackled from the virus in some places and could be in Australia before we know it." "This virus stopped the beetle in its tracks and, for the last 50 years or so, it more-or-less stayed put-that is, until now. "In the 1970s, scientists from Australia and elsewhere found that coconut rhinoceros beetles could be controlled with a beetle virus from Malaysia. Kayvan Etebari has been studying how palm-loving coconut rhinoceros beetles have been accelerating their invasion.
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