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Planet-Profit Report, reporting on sustainable development in the Western United States.

A beetle’s last stand?

A creative approach to slowing an epidemic

One answer to the mountain pine beetle epidemic may come from a retired engineer trying to save ponderosa pine on his land and a chemist who found the potential solution decades ago.

The engineer is Ray Prill (watch the interview) and the chemist is Marshall Wilson and they’ve formed DenDroCo (Den Dro is Latin for tree or arbor). In July DenDroCo was chosen as a semi-finalist in the Cleantech Open, a Redwood City, Calif.-based organization that helps entrepreneurs and investors working in cleantech fields develop and market their products.

The mountain pine beetle is decimating forest in the western U.S. and western Canada; estimates are nearly 70,000 square miles of forest — an area the size of Washington state — have died since 2000. British Columbia has been hit particularly hard, with estimates of 1 billion trees killed.

A warming climate suggests the epidemic will grow. Pine beetles generally attack mature trees, laying eggs inside the bark and creating a fungus, which eventually kills the tree. With warmer temperatures, they have been able to infest higher-elevation limber pine and whitebark pine, a main food source of the grizzly bear.

A few years ago Prill was researching the pine beetle and methods of combating it on his 120 acres south of Helena, Mont., when he found an article in the New York Times   that described the work of Wilson, who had synthesized a pheromone mimic that disrupted the natural processes of the beetle.

Prill contacted him, asking if or when such a product might be available for purchase. Wilson, then a researcher at the University of Cincinnati and now at Bowling Green State University, said he hadn’t worked on the project for years. Prill was able to interest him in revisiting his idea.

A few methods have been developed to combat the beetle. Chief among them is a pheromone that attracts beetles to a tree at such a scale that they put up a “no vacancy” sign — the beetles leave for another tree. Verbenone is the main compound used in this method and sells under that trade name. Another method is spraying with the insecticide carbaryl, sold under the  trade name Sevin.

One of the more creative ideas being researched today is use of recordings of the beetles’ own sounds — manipulated and played back to them. Researchers at Northern Arizona University say it disrupts their mating patterns.

DenDroCo takes another tact. Working with entomologists at Montana State University (MSU) and chemists in Ohio, it is testing Wilson’s pheromone mimic (dubbed “PheroTerm” for pheromone terminator) that attracts the bugs to a tree; once there a reactive component in the pheromone destroys their sense of smell. Confused, the beetles disperse and are unable to stage mass attacks on trees, a key component of their propagation.

Prill noted that there is nothing that is likely to rid the forests of pine beetles entirely and you wouldn’t want to do that anyway. “They’re a part of the system,” he said. “They’ve been in the forest as long as the forest has been.”
Prill currently is using “no vacancy” pheromones that are commercially available. “I’ve had some success on my place, but to be really effective, you need to put a lot of them up and twice a year,” he said, because they don’t put the beetles out of commission.

He is leery of spraying trees with carbaryl because it has been known to cause neurological effects and has shown up in Boulder, Colo.’s drinking water. He said the product DenDroCo is developing quickly degrades to a natural chemical composition.

Research and testing of the product and its effectiveness is ongoing, Prill said, who was trapping beetles to take to MSU for research when interviewed. He’s been frustrated some by an uncommonly rainy Montana summer, but believes researchers will be able to verify the behavioral aspects of the mimicking pheromone within a year and the company could go into manufacturing mode within two years.

Rocket Ventures Ignite!, a state of Ohio venture fund, provided a $50,000 grant to the company last year, and DenDroCo’s two principals have provided other needed funding. Being chosen by the Cleantech Open was a welcome development.

“It’s getting us introduced to people that we need to take the project further,” Prill said. “They’ve been very helpful with legal advice, patent advice, helping us get to the next level for financing the work.”

Prill said DenDroCo is “looking to be a major player” in pine beetle control and is looking toward the day PheroTerm is mass sprayed, which he thinks could be possible because “the nice thing about pheromones is that it takes so little of the product to be effective.”

To begin, however, he expects the product will be used like others to date: to save high value trees and trees in the urban forest interface. “If I could help save the whitebark pine I’d be thrilled,” he said. “It’s kind of my goal.”