Tag Archives: invasive insects
Good Sams discover exotic borer in Tarrant County
Last summer Texas Parks and Wildlife biologist, Sam Kieschnick, was going through pictures on iNaturalist and saw a picture of an insect taken by someone he knew. It was a shot of a shiny green beetle that 10-year-old nature enthusiast, Sam Hunt, had snapped in his own driveway near Eagle Mountain Lake in west Tarrant County. Something about the picture bothered biologist Sam, so he forwarded it to colleagues who were experts in a group of insects called buprestid beetles. The expert consensus seemed to be that 10-year-old… Read More →
Possible impact of Emerald Ash Borer in Texas
Last summer the Arkansas Agriculture Department and USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) announced that emerald ash borer (EAB) had been discovered in five counties in southwest Arkansas, bringing this pest only one county away from Texas. Despite the fact that it feeds only on ash (trees in the genus Fraxinus), the EAB is considered to be the most destructive forest pest ever seen in north America. Because it is getting so close to Texas, I thought I would speculate a little about what impact EAB might… Read More →
A berry bad pest
As if we needed more insect pests! Now there is a new pest of berries that is spreading rapidly around the U.S. The spotted wing Drosophila, Drosophila suzukii, is a native of Japan and was first discovered in California in 2008. It has spread quickly to berry growing areas on the west and east coasts, as well as Canada, Michigan and the northeast. It showed up in Colorado last year, and the first specimen in Texas was found by a faculty member in the entomology department at Texas… Read More →
A Simple Technique for Insect Removal
It’s summertime in Texas. As the temperature gets hotter, we all retreat into our air conditioned homes from the exhausting heat. Unfortunately, many insects have the same idea. There is, however, an easy way to get pesky insects, spiders, and even geckos, out of the house without hysteria and breaking things. The Jar Technique is a simple way to capture small crawling animals using just two different materials found around the house: a jar and an index card, credit card or a piece of paper. Many first reactions… Read More →
Ash borer destroys, Texas deploys
A story in Time magazine last month covered the toll being exacted on American urban forests by the emerald ash borer, the latest in a string of illegal immigrant destructive insects. According to the story, the toll of dead trees will likely surpass those felled by Dutch elm disease by the end of this year, making it the most destructive forest insect ever to invade North America. So what is the threat to Texas forests? Probably not as great as that being experienced in the east-central states where… Read More →