Tree-Killing Insects Adapting to Warmer Cities
By Megan Gannon, News Editor | LiveScience.com
Bizarre-looking bugs known as scale insects
may be tiny but they can take down an oak tree. Considered pests, the
creatures tend to flock to cities where they weaken, and in some cases,
kill trees by sucking out their sap.
"We now have a better understanding of why trees in urban areas are infested by so many of these pests," study researcher Steve Frank, an assistant professor of entomology at North Carolina State University, said in a statement. "And if climate change
causes temperatures to rise in forests, as we expect, we may see scale
insects becoming a much bigger problem for ecosystem health."
The team then collected scale insect egg sacs from both hot and cool
zones and incubated them in hot and cool greenhouses. In the hot
greenhouse, the egg sacs from the warmest urban zones produced almost four times as many insects as the egg sacs from cooler urban zones.
"The scale insects in the hotter urban zones appear to have adapted or
acclimated to the higher temperatures in urban environments," study
researcher Emily Meineke,
a doctoral student at NC State, said in the statement. "Theoretically,
that adaptation would also allow them to take advantage of warmer
temperatures that may result from climate change."
Their findings were detailed in a study published online last week in the journal PLOS ONE.
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