CANTON TWP.

Tom Yack steered his black SUV past the blue-and-elec-tric-purple walls of the Skatin’ Station II and swungsouth toward the industrial buildings that line RondaDrive.

To the east, the 1.1 million-square-foot W.F. Whelan Co.warehouse that used to be a Kmart distribution center. Alongthe road, companies that make up much of Canton Township’ssmall manufacturing base: Champagne Grinding & Manufactur-ing Co. and Directional Regulated Systems Inc. and a dozenothers.

“This is old industrial,” Yack said, ashe slowed the car. “This could be thearea.”

He has lived in the township since 1971,when it still touted itself as the “SweetCorn Capital of Michigan.” The sloganwouldn’t stick. A never-realized plan tointegrate the Detroit public schoolsthrough cross-district busing created ahousing boom. The Plymouth-Cantonschools were just outside the “desegre-gation area.” By the time Yack became township supervisor in1988, its population had quadrupled; the cornfields were beingreplanted with houses at a rate of 1,000 a year.

Yack was acting as a guide, offering his best guess about apoint of entry, the epicenter of the invasion, the place where theemerald ash borer, the most costly and destructive forest insectever to gnaw its way across North America, first arrived fromother shores.

Earlier this year, Michigan State University researcherspublished the results of a meticulous effort to determine whereand when the borer arrived and how it spread. They divided

Decades after beetles arrived in state,researchers looking to slow devastation

By Matthew Miller mrmiller@lsj.com

SUNDAY, JULY 27, 2014 K1 WWW.LSJ.COM

0 40901 05172 5

$3.00 RetailFor home deliverypricing, see Page 2A.

SUBSCRIBERSSAVE UP TO

$203IN TODAY’S

PAPER

VIOLENCE FORCES EVACUATIONS FROM US EMBASSY IN LIBYA PAGE 1B

SPORTS, 1C

SPORTS HALL THRIVESAFTER LEAN YEARS

MASON SHOPPINGIS MORE THANJUST ANTIQUES

LIFE, 1D

Michigan primary voterswill begin determining whatcould be one of the biggershake-ups in the state’s con-gressional delegation in years, arevamp that could become evenlarger if business-supportedRepublican challengers cantopple tea party-backed con-gressmen.

The Aug. 5 election featuresa bit of everything: four openseats, two heavily financedchallenges to incumbents andthe start to replacing the long-est-serving member of Con-gress in history.

While faces in the House del-egation will change, it’s unlikelythe GOP’s 9-5 edge will shiftcome November, according topolitical analysts. Some storylines in the primary races:

Open seatsJohn Dingell, a Dearborn

Democrat who has been in Con-gress for a record 58 years, isretiring along with RepublicansDave Camp, of Midland, andMike Rogers, of Brighton. Afourth House seat is opening upbecause Democratic Rep. GaryPeters, of Bloomfield Township,is running for the Senate seatheld by retiring Democrat CarlLevin.

It’s the most open seats since1992 — when redistricting, re-tirements and a primary upsetushered out seven of 18 Housemembers.

Due to gerrymanderedboundaries, voters in the fourdistricts are unlikely to sendsomeone from the other party toWashington, D.C. So whoeverwins the incumbent party’s pri-mary will in all likelihood be-come a member of Congress.

Odds are heavy that Dingell,whose father served 22 yearsbefore Dingell Jr. won election

PrimarycouldbringHouseshake-up4 open US seatsa rarity in stateBy David Eggertand Corey WilliamsAssociated Press

See HOUSE, Page 6A

TODAY’S FORECASTHigh in the low 80s, low near 60.Full forecast • 20A

Lottery .............................2ALocal & State...................9ABusiness Weekly............11A

Deaths .........17A, 18A, 19A USA TODAY.....................1B USA TODAY Money .......6B

Sports...............................1CUSA TODAY Sports ......12C Life....................................1D

Outlook ............................1E USA TODAY Life .............1U Classified ..............SOURCE

© 2014 Lansing StateJournal, Lansing, Michigan.

A Gannett Newspaper.

An ash tree near Bowers Harbor public boat launch near TraverseCity shows signs of being infested with the emerald ash borer, abeetle. AP PHOTO/TRAVERSE CITY RECORD-EAGLE, DOUGLAS TESNER

See ASH BORER, Page 3A

ONLINE» For a video onresearch into theash borer, morephotos and expandedcoverage, go tolsj.com.

CELEBRATING 78 YEARSOF BEING YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD FOOD STORE.

40 VARIETIES OF DONUTS • QD ICE & SOFT DRINKS • NO SURCHARGE ATM • LOTTERY-LOTTO • COOKIES

16 OF YOURFAVORITE FLAVORS AVAILABLE IN OUR

DIP CASE INCLUDING:DEATH BY CHOCOLATE

MINT CHOCOLATE CHIP • BUTTER PECANCHOC. CHIP COOKIE DOUGHMACKINAW ISLAND FUDGE

Michigan’s southeastern corner into agrid, searching in each square for thelongest dead or longest infestedgreen ash tree. They collected coresamples from 1,085 trees, used thethin tree rings of drought years andthick rings of abundant years to es-tablish dates.

The emerald ash borer probablyarrived in the early 1990s, they found,possibly as early as the late 1980s.Larvae likely were carried alonginside of wooden packing materialsfrom the borer’s native range in China.

Of those 1,085 trees, the one thatfell victim to the ash borer the earli-est was in Canton Township, a strokeof cosmic drollery, maybe. In the1830s, enthusiastic about burgeoningtrade with China, Michigan’s stateLegislature named three townshipsafter Chinese cities. Only in Cantondid the name stick.

When developers built on Canton’sfarmland, they had to plant trees orpay into a tree fund. The townshipplanted ash trees along its majorroads.

“A great street tree,” Yack said.“It was resistant to salt. It could doOK in drought periods. We mono-planted.”

“And the devastation was com-plete,” he said, “just complete.”

The ash borer has wiped out virtu-ally every ash tree in southeast Mich-igan. In much of the rest of the state’sLower Peninsula, there are few treesleft to fight for.

But, in a sense, this is still one ofthe front lines in the fight against aninsect that has laid waste to morethan 100 million ash trees from NewJersey to Colorado and has another 8 billion or so waiting.

Scientists here were the first torecognize the emerald ash borer as athreat. They gave the metallic greenbeetle a name in English. Some havespent the past dozen years chippingaway at the puzzle of how to stop aninsect that is singularly lethal to itshosts and uncommonly difficult totrack.

They have lost almost every bat-tle. They may yet win the war.

A MYSTERY OFDYING ASH

Ash yellows is a diseasecaused by a parasitic bacte-ria, spread by leafhoppersand spittlebugs, capable ofkilling a weak tree in as littleas a year. It was also the bestguess of arborists called uponto explain why the ash treesin western Wayne Countywere dying in the early 2000s.

It was Dave Roberts’ initial diag-nosis, but the MSU plant pathologisthad doubts.

In June 2001, an arborist namedGuerin Wilkinson asked Roberts tocome out to Bradbury Parkhomes, acondominium development in Ply-mouth. Every ash on the grounds wasin decline.

Bradbury Parkhomes is less than amile down Joy Road from CantonTownship’s industrial district.

The sickness didn’t look like ashyellows, Roberts recalled. A herbi-cide, maybe, but nothing fit. Then,that fall, he happened to visit the siteon a day when a grounds crew wascutting trees. He saw the inner bark

riddled with serpentine tunnels.The extent of the damage struck

him. “It seemed so aggressive.”He would return to collect larvae-

infested logs, breed out the bugs in alab at MSU. By the end of May, hehad green beetles that no one inMichigan could identify.

The entomologists got involvedthen, and the state and federal agen-cies. Teams of scientists made tripsto the Detroit suburbs that June toinspect the dying trees. There was agrowing sense of unease.

“As soon as we started lookingunder the bark of these trees, youknew something was going on,” saidDeborah McCullough, an MSU ento-mologist. “Ash trees don’t have anative insect that feeds like that.”

Samples of the beetle went to ex-perts in California and to RichardWestcott, a taxonomist who hadworked with beetles for more thanhalf a century. No match. More sam-ples went out, to the SmithsonianInstitution and the Natural HistoryMuseum in London, the two largestinsect collections in the world. Nomatch, again.

But there was still Eduard Jendek,an expert on Asian wood-boring bee-tles who worked for the Institute ofZoology at the Slovak Academy ofSciences in Bratislava. They emailedpictures, then sent the small greenbodies of the beetles across the At-lantic. On July 9, 2002, Jendek hadthe answer.

The next day Agrilus planipenniswas found on the other side of theDetroit River in Windsor. Five daysafter that, the Michigan Departmentof Agriculture set up a five-countyquarantine. What they didn’t know isthat the emerald ash borer alreadyreached had Cincinnati.

YELLOW RATS,GREEN BEETLES

The species now known asthe emerald ash borer be-came known to the Westernworld by way of a Frenchpriest and naturalist named

Armand David, who madethree trips through imperialChina in the 1860s and ’70s.

David was the first European tolay eyes on the gerbil and the giantpanda and dozens of other species.He found the emerald ash borer inBeijing. A brief description of thebeetle by the French entomologistLeon Fairmaire was published in theRevue d'Entomologie in 1888.

That description, 67 words in Lat-in, the barest accounting of the bor-er’s physiology, was one of just ahandful published in the west prior tothe borer’s appearance in Michiganmore than a century later.

Fairmaire assigned it to the genusAgrilus, a subset of jewel beetles and,with more than 3,000 species, themost populous genus of insects. Hegave it the species name Planipennis,a reference to its flat wings.

But it was a Czech entomologistnamed Jan Obenberger, publishing aseparate description of the borer in1930, who gave it the more propheticname, evocative of trade routes be-tween China and the West.

He called it Agrilus Marcopoli.

STROKE OF LUCK“We knew nothing in terms

of biology, except for a namewe got from the Slovakiantaxonomist,” said HoupingLiu. “We didn’t know whatkind of life cycle, what dam-age it can cause, even thehost materials. We foundthem on ash, but we didn’tknow if they were going toattack other tree species.”

Liu is a forest entomologist withthe Pennsylvania Department ofConservation and Natural Resources.In 2002, he was a post-doctoral re-searcher at MSU working with theU.S. Forest Service.

And it was in the campus offices ofthe Forest Service that the research-ers had their first stroke of luck.

At the end of a 1998 trip to China tostudy the Asian longhorn beetle, a

Deb McCullough, an MSU entomologist and one of the worlds foremost expert on the emerald ash borer, inspects an ash tree at a research area on the MSU campus filled with ashtrees. GREG DERUITER/LANSING STATE JOURNAL

A piece of one of the first trees cut downin the search for the ash borer inMichigan reveals what would become afamilar sight — infestation. GREG

DERUITER/LANSING STATE JOURNAL

Entomologist Robert Haack found a description of the beetle later dubbed the emeraldash borer in the book “Forest Insects of China,” which was given to him as a gift from aChinese entomologist. MATTHEW DAE SMITH | FOR THE LSJ

BEETLE BIOAdult emerald ash borers are rough-ly half an inch long. The color oftheir bodies is a shiny, metallic emer-ald green, with a coppery red un-derneath the wings. The segments ofits antennae take on a sawtoothshape as they get further from itsbody. It has massive eyes and flatwings. When they emerge fromtrees, they leave D-shaped exit holesin the bark. For additional informa-tion, go towww.emeraldashborer.info.

Ash borerContinued from Page 1A

Researchers have determined theemerald ash borer first arrived inMichigan in the early 1990s. AP FILE

Former Supervisor Tom Yack witnessedthe devastation caused by the emeraldash borer in Canton Township. ROD SANFORD/LANSING STATE JOURNAL

See ASH BORER, Page 4A

www.lsj.com Lansing State Journal • Sunday, July 27, 2014 • 3A

4A • Sunday, July 27, 2014 • Lansing State Journal www.lsj.com

Chinese researcher had presentedRobert Haack, an entomologist at theForest Service, with a 1,000-pageguide to Chinese forest pests writtenin Chinese. He couldn’t read it, butLiu could.

And, indeed, the book contained adescription of the emerald ash borer,a page-and-a-half account of its lifecycle and eating habits and the speedwith which the larvae could kill atree.

“It didn’t give us any of the realdetails,” Haack said, “because someof our agrilus infest in the branches,some infest the major trunk, someare root feeders. And then we weren’tsure if there were any natural enemies.”

But it was something, one of justthree published studies.

One of three because no one inChina and other parts of its naturalrange cared much about the borer.They mostly didn’t have to. The Man-churian ash and Chinese ash andother Asian species have an evolu-tionary history with the insect. Theyproduce compounds toxic to emeraldash borer larvae.

“If you go to China, the only treesthat it’s going to attack, the only na-tive ash trees, are trees that are real-ly stressed,” McCullough said. “Dy-ing. That level of stress.”

On a trip to China the followingyear, Liu and colleagues from Chinatracked down the researcher who haddone the original article, hoping hehad more to tell them.

Chengming Yu was in his 80s bythen. Liu never got to talk to him inperson, but his Chinese colleaguesdid. Yu said he’d done his researchback in the 1960s, after white ashtrees were brought to China from theUnited States and all of them diedfrom infestations.

But the older man had nothingmore to say about emerald ash borer.

“If you know a little bit of historyabout China, there was a 10-yearCultural Revolution where all theintellectuals, the professors weresent to the countryside to do laborinstead of doing research,” Liu said.

Yu had been among them. Hisresearch notes had been lost.

‘WRECK OF ANOLD CATHEDRAL’

American chestnut treesonce grew from southernMaine to the Florida Panhan-dle and west as far as theMississippi River. Their nutssupported sky-blackeningflocks of passenger pigeons,broods of turkeys, raccoonsand squirrels and deer andbears and humans, too.

In 1904, the chief forester for theNew York Zoological Park found thatchestnut trees on the zoo’s groundswere being attacked by a fungus thatwould become known as chestnutblight. By 1950, it had killed virtuallyevery mature chestnut tree in thecountry.

In some areas of the AppalachianMountains, one tree out of every fourhad been a chestnut. The forests wehave now are not the forests we had200 or even 50 years ago.

“To somebody who doesn’t knowanything about the woods, you go outand you see a lot of trees with leavesand it all looks great,” said SusanFreinkel. She is the author of “Amer-ican Chestnut.” “But if you knowwhat ought to have been there, thekind of diversity that should havebeen there, then to you it looks likethe wreck of an old cathedral.”

Some change is normal. Ecosys-tems rejigger their balance. Specieslose ground to competitors, find newniches to exploit.

But as more container ships passback and forth across the oceans,species are strewn and scattered at afaster rate, placed into environmentswhere there are no predators to keepthem in check, where their prey nev-er evolved to resist them.

Take Dutch elm disease. Elm spe-cies in Asia, where it probably orig-inated, are reasonably resistant. Eu-ropean and American elms are not.

Dutch elm arrived on the EastCoast of the United States in the1930s. It has killed 100 million elmshere since.

Elms had been the dominantAmerican street tree. When theybegan to die, cities replanted withmaple and with ash.

ERADICATIONBefore the emerald ash

borer was found in the UnitedStates, there was the Asianlonghorned beetle, an killerof hardwoods found in New

York and Chicago in the latterhalf of the 1990s.

Federal and state agencies pur-sued a strategy of eradication, chop-ping down infested trees by the thou-sands. When the fight against theemerald ash borer began, the meth-ods used against the longhorned bee-tle seemed like an obvious template.

And, in retrospect, a bad one.“We now know that Asian long-

horned beetle and emerald ash borerare very, very different plant pests interms of their biology and ecology,”said Paul Chaloux, national policymanager for the emerald ash borerprogram at the U.S. Department ofAgriculture’s Animal and PlantHealth Inspection Service.

Asian longhorned beetles are big,black and white and shiny. They chewdime-sized holes into the trees wherethey lay their eggs, a clear sign oftheir presence. They spread slowly,often re-infesting the same tree yearsin a row.

Emerald ash borer infestationstypically aren’t visible until the treesare already half-dead. The beetlesare smaller. They lay their eggs co-vertly in cracks and crevasses in thebark of ash trees. Their larvae feedexclusively on the phloem, the part ofa tree that carries nutrients from theleaves, killing their hosts with un-common speed.

And they spread fast, unpredict-ably.

“There’s some portion - one per-cent, five percent, who knows - ofthese females that just take off andfly,” McCullough said.

Lab tests show they’re capable offlying as much as three miles in aday. Larvae carried along in firewoodcan go much farther, which is prob-ably how the emerald ash borerreached Boulder, Colo., where it wasdiscovered last fall, hundreds ofmiles from any previously discov-ered infestation.

“With a number of the pests thatour agency has historically dealtwith, it’s relatively difficult for theaverage person to move the pest,”Chaloux said. “The average personvery rarely handles whole wheatgrain, so a pest of wheat is not some-thing that the average person is like-ly to move around.”

“The average citizen certainly canand, we have evidence, certainly hasbrought the EAB to new locations,”he said.

Michigan’s five-county quarantineestablished in 2002, restricting themovement of ash nursery stock andlogs and any sort of firewood, quicklyexpanded to six counties and then 13and then 20, growing as the true ex-tent of the infestation became clear.It hasn’t stopped expanding.

In 2004, Canada cut more than60,000 ash trees between Lake Erieand Lake St. Clair to create a six-

2002-2004

Where EAB first detected, by year

2011-2014** Includes District of Columbia

2008-20102005-2007

OH

GA

NC

PANJ

MD

DC

NHMA

CTPA

MI

IL

IA

MONECO

MN

IN

WVVA

TN

KY

WI

Ash borer

Jason Thornton hauls out cut ash trees and brush as ash trees are cut down in Delta Township in 2005 to try to stop emerald ash borerinfestation. LANSING STATE JOURNAL FILE PHOTO

Ingham County MSU extension horticulture agent Gary Heilig, left, checks ash trees onEdward Kowalski's land, right, in rural Onondaga in 2003 for any evidence of ash borerdamage. He found no evidence of the ash borers. LANSING STATE JOURNAL FILE PHOTO See ASH BORER, Page 5A

mile-wide barrier they hoped theborer couldn’t cross. The next year,satellite populations were found onthe other side.

None of the 12 specialists inter-viewed for a 2006 report from theGeneral Accounting Office believederadicating the borer was stillpossible.

“It became very evident that thetree removal campaign was certainlynot going to be effective,” Chalouxsaid.

A VISUAL BUGFew people understand the

borer’s ability to confoundthose who would track itsspread than Therese Poland.

She’s an entomologist with the U.S. Forest Service in East Lansingand the owner of what is probably theworld’s only anatomically correct,hand-knitted emerald ash borer. Al-most immediately after the borerwas discovered, she began puttingash leaves and the beetles them-selves into ethanol, making extracts,analyzing them with gas chromatog-raphy and mass spectrometry, hook-ing the borers into electro-antennaldetectors to see which compoundsthey might respond to.

The hope was to find somethingthat could lure the beetles from adistance, bring them into traps, allowresearchers to track small infesta-tions as well as devastating ones.

Alas, the emerald ash borer is avisual bug. If humans had eyes of thesame proportion to our bodies, they’dbe the size of grapefruit. It has cer-tain preferred colors, as reflected inthe Barney-the-Dinosaur-purple nowused for emerald ash borer traps, andit likes the silhouettes of trees, butvisual cues don’t exert a long-dis-

tance pull.There are compounds that attract

it, Poland said. There is a green leafvolatile called cis-3 hexenol and anumber of sesquiterpenes from ashbark that, as luck would have it, are pretty well mimicked by manukaoil. Canadian researchers are work-ing on what might be a short-rangepheromone.

“We have traps now that are betterthan nothing,” Poland said, “butthey’re not super sensitive at detect-ing low infestations...Usually, by thetime we find it, it’s been there for afew years.”

INVADERSThe Congressional Re-

search Service pegs the costof estimated 50,000 non-na-tive species in the U.S. at $129 billion each year.

That’s everything from densestands of leafy spurge supplantinggrasses on grazing lands in the westto quagga mussels clogging the waterintakes of nuclear power plants onthe Great Lakes.

The federal government spent $2.2 billion in 2012 to combat invasivespecies and to prevent new entries.The USDA spent $26.8 million thatyear to fight the emerald ash borer.In 2013, it spent just $10.7 million.

The emerald ash borer probablycosts at least $1 billion each year inthe U.S. That figure comes fromstudies by the U.S. Forest Service,and it only takes into account theremoval, treatment and replacementof trees in urban areas. Another esti-mate, from a team of U.S. and Cana-dian researchers, placed annual dam-ages at $1.6 billion including the lossof residential property values andtimber.

The timing of the invasion exacer-bated that burden. By the time theborer was discovered, Michigan al-ready was entering a single-staterecession. Cities and property own-ers were stuck paying for the remov-al of dead trees and the planting ofnew ones if they could afford it.

The emerald ash borer was foundin Ingham County in 2003 in nurserytrees planted at Meridian Mall andelsewhere. In Lansing, it was 2006before the ash tree started dying inlarge numbers. The city removedapproximately 6,500 ash trees at arough cost of $800 each, said PaulDykema, assistant superintendent ofoperations and maintenance, thoughhe cautioned that no one had calculat-ed the city’s total cost.

“It’s taken them out of the landscape entirely,” Dykema said.

Continued from Page 3A

www.lsj.com Lansing State Journal • Sunday, July 27, 2014 • 5A

ONE CITY’SSOLUTION

The emerald ash borercosts the city of Milwaukee$980,000 a year, but ash treesstill are very much part ofthe city’s streetscape. Themoney pays for insecticidetreatments for 14,000 ashtrees each year.

Milwaukee took an uncommonlydeliberate approach to the invader. Itassessed its urban canopy in 2008,found that ash trees made up nearly afifth of it and started a conversationabout what it would really mean tolose them.

“We knew we’d have other ancil-lary impacts,” city forestry servicesmanager David Sivyer said.

Trees intercept rainfall and soblunt the impact of heavy storms oncity drainage systems. Their shadekeeps temperatures lower in sum-mer, reducing the energy used for airconditioning. Many species interceptand sequester airborne pollutants.And then there’s the cost of replac-ing, not just trees, but trees that havesurvived long enough and grownlarge enough to provide those bene-fits.

“It turns out that our trees areproviding some $15 million annuallyin storm water benefits and almost$4 million annually in other benefits:air quality, energy reduction andcarbon sequestration,” Sivyer said.

Which wouldn’t have matteredeven a year prior. But, in 2008, a Mas-sachusetts company called Arborjetreleased TREE-äge®, the first in-secticide that worked well on theemerald ash borer.It killed more than99 percent of emerald ash borer lar-vae in treated trees and 100 percentof the adult beetles that nibbled ontheir leaves. A silver bullet with limi-tations, among them the fact that ithad to be injected directly into eachtree.

That required knowing the loca-tion of every ash tree in a 97-square-mile city, which Milwaukee got bypaying for hyperspectral imaging ofthe urban canopy.

The emerald ash borer was foundin Milwaukee in 2012, an infestationon private property that had begun atleast four years prior. The ash treeslining the adjacent street werehealthy. They still are.

NATURALENEMIES

“This tree has begun toform scar tissue.”

Leah Bauer had her handon the trunk of a thin ash treein Central Park in Okemos,just north of Meridian Mall.

“If I were to cut into here, wewould have live phloem, right hereand over here,” she said, “which iswhy this branch is alive.”

There are ash trees growing in theforest here, stump sprouts, saplingsthat lingered in the forest understoryuntil a gap in the canopy gave themlight and room to grow — survivors.Bauer, a U.S. Forest Service entomol-ogist, is keenly interested in theirsuccess because she is keenly in-terested in whether the wasps aredoing what they’re meant to.

From the start, the federal govern-ment’s efforts to combat the emeraldash borer included a trickle of moneyfor what’s known as bio-control. Ithas since become the focus.

Researchers found that the emer-ald ash borer has few natural ene-mies in North America — woodpeck-

ers are an exception — and so in 2003researchers from the Forest Serviceand the Animal and Plant HealthInspection Service began searchingin the borer’s native range for para-sites. They brought back species ofthree tiny stingless wasps.

Oobius agrili — Bauer calls it“oobs” — is the size of a poppy seedand lays its eggs inside borer eggs.The slightly larger Tetrastichus pla-nipennisi, or “tets,” lays eggs insideborer larvae. The hatching larvae ofSpathius agrili feed and develop onash borer larvae.

In 2007, they began releasing thewasps in small numbers at test sitesin mid-Michigan. A breeding facilityopened in 2009 in a non-descriptbuilding in Brighton.

The borers are bred out in card-board drums. The wasps are bred onborer eggs and larvae and thenshipped to 17 states for release. TheEAB Biological Control ProductionFacility is on track to produce735,000 wasps this year.

It’s Bauer’s job to determine howthe wasps establish themselves in thewild, what impact they have on emer-ald ash borer populations and howthat matters for ash trees. She hasbeen observing populations at sixsites in Ingham, Clinton, Shiawassee,Saginaw and Gratiot counties.

At one and only one site, the ashtrees are growing bigger, she said.She needs more data. It’s not the sortof study that happens quickly. Thelife cycle of a tree is long.

CULTURES INJEOPARDY

According to a story toldby Anishinabe people inMichigan and elsewhere, thefirst black ash tree grewfrom the cremated body of aman named Black Elk.

Nearing the end of his life, thestory goes, Black Elk asked the cre-ator for a way to help his people. Hewas given a vision. His people wereto watch over the tree that wouldsprout from his buried ashes, to holdit sacred. He saw how it could be cutdown, how to separate the growthrings from one another, how to fash-ion the wood into baskets.

“The black ash tree has been usedby our people for centuries and cen-turies,” said Kelly Church. “It’s a treethat is very flexible, so when youpound the growth rings apart, youcan bend it, twist it, you can steam it.We make cradle boards from it, snow-

shoes, baskets.”Church is a basket maker from a

family of basket makers, part of theGrand Traverse Band of Ottawa andChippewa Indians. Her house outsideof Hopkins has largely been givenover to studio space for her elab-orate, often colorful, creations.

But the trees that that supply herworking materials are dying. Differ-ent species of ash have differentlevels of susceptibility to theash bor-er. Blue ashis relatively resistant,white ash a little less so. Green andblack ash are the most vulnerable.

“The black ash trees dying is likelosing a part of our culture,” Churchsaid. “It’s going to be devastating, forthe future generations especially.”

For other tribes, too. In the cre-ation myth of the Wabanaki tribes inNew England, for instance, the blackash is the source of humankind.Glooscap, who came into their lands“first of all,” shot arrows into blackash trees. Humans came out fromunder the bark.

Insecticides won’t help save treesfor the basket makers. It wouldn’t besafe. They use their hands in themanufacturing process, their mouths,too. Since the threat of the borerbecame clear, there have been con-ferences and seed collection pro-grams, efforts to document the bas-ket-making process and to teach theyoung who might be alive to see theblack ash restored.

It’s not as if another tree wouldwork, Church said.

“It’s kind of like saying, ‘We lostour language. Let’s just make upanother one.’”

THE SURVIVORSEven in the southeast cor-

ner of Michigan, where morethan 99 percent of the matureash trees have died, a fewsurvive, a few tenths of a per-cent of a population that num-bered in the millions. DanHerms and his colleagues aretrying to figure out why.

“The big question is, ‘Are thoseash trees actually resistant or arethey just lucky?’” said Herms, anentomologist at Ohio State Univer-sity, “because, if you look at the rateat which trees die, it’s a bell curve.By definition, there’s going to be afew remaining trees out on the tail ofthe bell curve.”

Lingering ash. That’s what theycall the survivors. Herms and hiscolleagues have collected their buds,planted clones to be exposed to theemerald ash borer. They don’t knowyet if the native resistance is real, butit would be “the ideal situation,”Herms said.

It’s not the only solution. It shouldalso be possible to cross North Amer-ican ash with the resistant trees fromChina, to produce trees that are near-ly identical to the American speciesgenetically but also able to protectthemselves from the borer.

The goal, Herms said “is to essen-tially do what natural selection hasdone over evolutionary time,” only todo it far more quickly.

The deaths of 100 million treeshave consequences.

There are, for instance, at least260 species of insects that use ashtrees as a host, at least 44 that do soexclusively. Gaps that have openedup in the forest canopy are allowinginvasive plants to thrive on the forestfloor, buckthorn and honeysuckle andmulti-floral rose. In rivers andswamps where the ash have died, thewater chemistry and temperatureand flow are changing

And the emerald ash borer will killmore trees. Scientists have foundways to slow it down, but no way tostop it on a large scale.

“I guess I expect that it will even-tually spread from coast to coast,”McCullough said.

The hope is to buy time, to findnew tools, to keep the ash trees alivelong enough to save them.

Ash borerContinued from Page 4A

Leah Bauer checks out damage to an ash tree from the emerald ash borer at a park in Meridian Township in June. GREG DERUITER/LANSING

STATE JOURNAL

COST IN DOLLARSSpending on emerald ash borerprograms by the U.S. Department ofAgriculture’s Animal and PlantHealth Inspection Service.

YearTotal (in thousands of

dollars)2002 243

2003 12,748

2004 40,156

2005 31,252

2006 18,747

2007 22,611

2008 24,694

2009 34,310

2010 37,262

2011 33,538

2012 26,841

2013 10,657

Total 293,059 Source: USDA

U.S. Forest Service biological technician Emily Loubert, left, and entomologist TobyPetrice, apply a non-toxic sticky substance on traps designed to catch the ash borer atLegg Park in Meridian Township in June. MATTHEW DAE SMITH/FOR THE LANSING STATE JOURNAL

East Lansing public works environmental specialist Dave Smith marks ash trees forremoval on Lake Lansing Road in 2007. LANSING STATE JOURNAL FILE PHOTO