New Hampshire Worries About Asian Longhorned Beetle

Scientists believe Asian Longhorned Beetles first came to the U.S. inside wooden shipping pallets from their native China.

By the time they were discovered in Worcester, Massachusetts last summer, they’d been thriving in the city’s trees for a decade.

The beetles spread over 64-square miles in the largest infestation in North America. Federal officials put the area under quarantine and had more than 20,000 trees cut down. The cost of the ongoing eradication effort is expected to top $250M. With the New Hampshire border just 40 miles away, officials and scientists here are alarmed.

“We want to know if we’ve got a Worcester on our hands in NH,” says Kyle Lombard, a state Forest Entomologist. “I think it’s highly likely at this point that at some point in last ten years it’s been accidentally introduced into New Hampshire.”

If that’s true, to save trees and money, and contain the outbreak, it’s crucial to find Asian Longhorned Beetles early. They infest maple, ash, birch and other hardwood trees that New England’s tourism, timber and maple syrup industries depend on.

“The devastation that it can cause is really unknown and unlimited. The potential is like no other insect we’ve ever had introduced in New England,” Lombard says.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says, if the beetles expand outside current quarantine zones in Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey, potential industry losses could top 41 billion dollars. The agency is helping to fund and coordinate a large regional campaign to find any current infestations, and educate the public to prevent new ones.

The new ban on out of state firewood at campgrounds in state and national forests will be part of that campaign. A state survey found that up to 40 percent of campers who came here from out of state brought their own firewood with them.

The state’s primary concern is finding the estimated 1,000 people from Worcester who own second homes in New Hampshire and might have brought firewood here. Letters about the beetles have gone out to 200 of them so far. When they respond, the state sends Forest Technician Mike Simmons to survey the properties.

“There is quite a bit of maple firewood in here. Sugar maple and red maple. So we have our work cut out for us,” he says, while shuffling through a huge stack of firewood at a vacation home in Rumney.

The homeowner, a Worcester resident, called the state to say she’s brought firewood here from the quarantine zone for years, and she said she had seen some beetles on her land. Simmons’ job is to scour the property; he checks tree bark for niches where Asian Longhorned Beetles lay eggs, or the telltale round, pencil-width exit holes where they bore out of the tree.

The trees on this property are healthy but some of the firewood catches his eye.

“Well here’s a piece of red maple, with some larval galleries in the heartwood,” he says.

He calmly takes out his knife and digs at the red, rotted wood.

“There are several species of beetle that will bore into this type of wood. So just because we have some excavation by something, we can’t automatically assume that it is Asian Longhorned Beetle,” Simmons cautions.

And this time, it wasn’t… Sigh of relief, on to the next house, and the next one. A lot of people have been calling the state with false alarms as the outreach campaign has started working. Simmons says they’re probably seeing some White Spotted Sawyer Beetles. The Asian Longhorneds have white spots too, but their size is distinctive – they can grow up to an inch and a half long, with even longer antennae.

Besides vacation homes and campgrounds, the state is also looking for them in the cities of Portsmouth, Nashua and Manchester, where infested pallets could have been shipped.

They have a lot of trees to survey, and Scientists say negative results can be unsettling. Did they look carefully enough, did they miss anything? That concern is understandable; the Asian Longhorned Beetles were in Worcester for ten years before anybody noticed.