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News From 91.3 KUWS
Invasive species eating beetles released in Washburn County
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Story posted Tuesday at 12:58 p.m. 10/10/2009 |
Washburn County is using a biological weapon to fight against the invasive wildflower purple loosestrife. Rich Kremer reports the county is growing and releasing purple loosestrife beetles.
Washburn County Aquatic Invasive Species Coordinator Lisa Gabriel has been growing beetles for about three years. These small brown bugs, half the size of a pencil eraser, are a natural enemy of the purple loosestrife. Gabriel says her crew digs up some loosestrife plants and collects beetles from former release sites and puts them in two mass rearing cages. She says the beetles have a good life while in the cage. There’s lots of feeding and mating in the cages.
“They lay eggs and once the larvae come out they feed pretty extensively on the stems, kind of killing off the loosestrife, and then once the larvae turn into adults we try to collect as many as we can and take them out into the wild.”
Gabriel says during a good year she can raise up to 100,000 beetles in a single cage but this year only 50,000 adults were released.
“We did pretty bad, the weather usually plays a big role in that and with the cold weather this year it just seemed like everything was very slow and beetles were really slow, we just didn’t get that many.”
Gabriel says the beetles they did raise this year are helping keep purple loosestrife from riding rivers to different counties.
“There’s a lot of purple loosestrife along the Yellow River. So, that basically goes all the way down into Burnett County so we’re trying to prevent seeds from spreading down in Burnett County. So, we’ve hit the Yellow River pretty extensively in the last few years and then we also try to get some of the side ditch areas that has been pretty prolific.”
Purple loosestrife, though nice to look at, is an aggressive invasive species that chokes out indigenous plants, degrading wetland and river systems.
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