Beetle Tents

 

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Blount County, Tn.

 

Video Transcript

Chuck Denney (UT Institute of Agriculture)
Tents are a common site in the Smoky Mountains, but usually the variety that house people, not trees and bugs. Inside these tents grow pretty hemlocks. But each young tree is infested with wooly adelgids, a harmful insect that feeds on the branches, starving the hemlock until it dies.

Dr. Jerome Grant (UT Experiment Station)
“You can see the adelgid on the twigs, the needles - the white, fluffy mass.”

Chuck Denney
Dr. Jerome Grant with UT’s Agricultural Experiment Station has a little friend to introduce to the adelgids. He’s part of a research team turning predatory beetles loose in these trees.

Dr. Jerome Grant
“These were reared at our Lindsey Young beneficial insects lab on the UT campus. We have 300 adults inside this container.”

Chuck Denney
The favorite thing these beetles like to eat – wooly adelgids. With the tents enclosing the beetles and the adelgids, nature should solve the tree’s woes. Call this eradication, undercover.

Dr. Jerome Grant
“The goal of the tents is to help us better understand the survival, reproduction of these introduced, natural enemies and see how well they fit into Tennessee climate.”    

Chuck Denney
There are a dozen of these tents here at Blackberry Farm.  Some contain beetles raised in labs back on the UT Ag campus in Knoxville, while others feature new species from Asia.

Dr. Jerome Grant
“They each have different feeding behaviors and times of feeding. What we want to do inside the cages is try to see how they fit into our system in Tennessee - how they impact the adelgid and maybe determine the best complex of natural enemies that we can release.”

Chuck Denney
Some hemlocks in the smokies are nearly 200 feet tall and hundreds of years old. Adelgids threaten thousands of acres of hemlocks here, and these insects have destroyed trees from New England to the southeast. This project is happening at Blackberry Farm, a resort in Walland that has trees infested with adelgids.       

David Wallace (Blackberry Farm)
“We’ve got I don’t know how many hemlocks on the property, but they’re all over the place, thousands of them probably. Some of them are in different stages of decline and we’re trying our best to save them.”

Chuck Denney
The hungry beetles will make this tent their home for the next year or so, provided the structure can stand the elements like wind. UT researchers believe this enclosed lab will reveal which beetles work best at stopping the adelgids - critical information that could someday preserve a staple of Smoky Mountain beauty.

END

NOTE: All predatory beetles released in this study have been approved by the USDA and are not a threat to other organisms. UT scientists also use insecticides in their efforts to save trees.