Emerald ash borer, has been discovered in three additional square-mile plots within that city, all of them next to plots where it had been previously detected.
The is the cause of a in Boulder County and a few small parcels of surrounding land.
The new finds won’t change the quarantine’s boundaries, said Laura Pottorff, Colorado Department of Agriculture’s quarantine manager. But they are a reminder that the insect is expected to spread to many Front Range cities in the coming years.
“We can see that the damage is there” in trees in the three new grids, she said, “and we know the adults are flying. We have seen them.”
The Asian insect arrived in Michigan in the 1990s and was identified in 2002. All American ash species — genus Fraxinus — are susceptible because they lack the defenses that Chinese ash species evolved to control the pest. Once a tree is infested, it’s virtually certain to die unless treated with pesticides. In the Midwest and two Canadian provinces, the bugs have killed tens of millions of trees.
For Coloradans,
that shows where the insect has been found is available at eabcolorado.com. The state also at eabcolorado.com where property owners can type in a ZIP code for information if they have ash trees.
Currently, chemical treatments for the insect outside of a 5-mile radius from a positive identification site.
The identification of the new infested grids was based on captured adult beetles and trees with symptoms of infestation, Pottorff said. Come late fall and winter, branches of those and other trees showing symptoms will likely be peeled to see if larvae can be found, she said.
So far, no discoveries of the insect have been found outside of the city of Boulder, she said. What most communities are doing right now is checking ash trees for symptoms of the decline associated with the insect.
“I don’t want to give the false impression that we feel secure,” Pottorff said. “We don’t.”
Most important, Pottorff said, is for Coloradans to be aware of the pest, observe the quarantine and “We do expect the insect will naturally spread,” she said. “We’re trying to control unnatural, human-assisted spread.”
If you think you have found a tree with emerald ash borer, contact the state Department of Agriculture at 888-248-5535 or e-mail caps.program@state.co.us
Susan Clotfelter: 303-954-1078, sclotfelter@denverpost.com or twitter.com/susandigsin
