June 20, 2016 by Sean Nealon
A species of wasp that is a
natural enemy of a wood-boring beetle that kills black locust trees has been
rediscovered, more than 100 years after the last wasp of this species was
found.
The discovery is significant
because the wood-boring beetle, known as the locust borer, is considered a
serious pest that has discouraged planting of black locusts, which played an
important role in American history. The trees, whose wood is strong,
hard and extremely durable, helped build the Jamestown settlement and were
featured prominently at George Washington's Mount Vernon.
The only previous known specimens
of the wasp (Oobius depressus) date back to 1914 and were found in Morristown,
Illinois. The problem with those specimens is that they were missing their
heads and antennae, making them difficult to identify even by specialists of
that wasp family, Encyrtidae.
That led Serguei V. Triapitsyn,
director of the UC Riverside Entomology Research Museum, and Toby R. Petrice,
an entolomogist with the U.S.D.A. Forest Service Northern Research Station in
Lansing, Mich., to search for new specimens.
This was not an easy task because
eggs of locust borer, particularly ones parasitized by this wasp, are extremely
difficult to find. Adults of the locust borer itself, on the other hand, are
common in the Midwest in early fall because they feed on the pollen of
goldenrod.
Because females visit black
locust trees to lay eggs, the scientists placed an insect trap designed to
collect beetles and other arboreal insects in the canopy of a black locust tree
at Rose Lake State Wildlife Area in Bath Charter Township, Mich., from August
to October 2015.
Petrice installed and maintained
the trap and collected samples in ethanol, which were then sent in early 2016
to the UC Riverside Entomology Research Museum for sorting in Triapitsyn's lab
by Vladimir V. Berezovskiy, a volunteer who is a retired museum preparator.
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