bark in Biological News

Complex dynamics underlie bark beetle eruptions

... North America more susceptible to infestation by bark beetles, according to an article published in the June 2008 BioScience. bark beetle epidemics have become more extensive and ... of the biological processes that determine when a bark beetle eruption will occur. When beetles bore ...

UBC discovery unlocks tree genetics, gives new hope for pine beetle defense

... of conifers interacting with genomes of bark beetles and bark beetle-associated fungal pathogens. Bohlmanns ... the mid 1990s. This is the largest recorded bark beetle outbreak in Canada, leaving B.C. with 13 ...

The proof is in the tree bark

... flame retardant Dechlorane Plus in the bark of trees across the northeastern United States, ... Hites said the study demonstrates that tree bark can be used as nature's own passive sampling ... the air. Rough, porous and high in lipids, tree bark soaks up airborne gases and particles, then keeps ...

American Chemical Society's Weekly PressPac -- Nov. 14, 2007

... IMMEDIATE RELEASE Sweet magnolia: Tree bark extract fights bad breath and tooth decay ... reporting that breath mints made with magnolia bark extract kill most oral bacteria that cause bad ... tested the germ-killing power of magnolia bark extract using saliva samples taken from ...

Long-term study of orchard ground cover management systems

... herbicide, post-emergence herbicide, mowed sod grass, and hardwood bark mulch. All systems had been maintained since 1992 in an orchard near ... growth and yield observations from 1992 to 2003 showed that the hardwood bark mulch and post-emergence herbicide treatments produced more tree growth ...

U-M scientists remove thousands of aspens to glimpse forest's future

... to glimpse the Great Lakes region's future forests. A band of bark was stripped from each tree to kill it without cutting it down. The ... Other workers follow with hammers and steel pry bars, stripping a band of bark from the trees. Girdling trees kills them while preventing them from ...

Highlights from the March editions of ESA journals

... species invasions at some sites. In addition, a combination of prescribed burns and mechanical thinning increased the incidence of tree death from bark beetles and wood borers. Still, the authors emphasize that a no-treatment option is not sustainable in these fire-prone environments. They recommend ...

Study finds hemlock trees dying rapidly, affecting forest carbon cycle

... North Carolina. Researchers compared rates of decline of adelgid-infested hemlock trees to a small number of girdled (severely wounded the bark of a tree to initiate tree mortality) trees that were not infested. Researchers tracked changes in the carbon cycle of these hemlock stands over a ...

Landscape-scale treatment promising for slowing beetle spread

... to insecticides, which can have adverse environmental effects. Thinning of some overstocked forests is still recommended to reduce susceptibility to bark beetles. But, the flakes can provide some protection for the dense, old-growth stands required by wildlife, according to the scientists. The ...

NAU research ties tree mortality trends to climate warming

... To determine when trees died as a result of climate change, scientists documented climate-related incidents that caused trees to die, such as bark beetle attacks or forest fires. Ful worked with NAU researchers to provide tree measurements from more than 6,000 trees, mostly ponderosa pines, ...

Tree deaths have doubled across the western US

... to higher death rates, he said. Warmer temperatures also might favor insects and diseases that attack trees. Some recent outbreaks of tree-killing bark beetles in the West have already been linked to warming temperatures. "Tree death rates are like interest on a bank account the effects compound ...

Warmer climate causing huge increase in tree mortality across the West

... Survey and other sources. Using various approaches, the researchers examined mechanisms that can cause localized or temporary tree deaths, such as bark beetle epidemics, forest fire, increasing competition, fire exclusion, even old trees falling and crushing younger ones. But the only causative ...

American Chemical Society's Weekly PressPac -- Dec. 17, 2008

... that the mountain pine beetle has killed millions of acres of pine trees. About the size of a grain of rice, the beetles damage trees by boring into bark and depositing their eggs. Dead trees also pose a forest fire risk, the article notes. Scientists now are fighting back with a combination of ...

Lichens function as indicators of nitrogen pollution in forests

... Other harmful effects include elevated nitrate concentrations in streams and groundwater, and weakened California forests more susceptible to bark beetle infestations and fires. The U.S. Forest Service funded the study, which included the agency's own researchers working with scientists at the ...

Cross kingdom conflicts on a beetle's back

... animal kingdom, Currie teamed up with Clardy to examine the pine beetle. Pine beetles are like little landscape engineers, drilling through the bark and into pine trees, using fungus to create an environment in which to lay their eggs. As a result of this activity, thousands of miles of trees are ...

Wielding microbe against microbe, beetle defends its food source

... MADISON -- As the southern pine beetle moves through the forest boring tunnels inside the bark of trees, it brings with it both a helper and a competitor. The helper is a fungus that the insect plants inside the tunnels as food for its young. ...

Prosthetic vein valve designed to direct blood flow shows promising pre-clinical results

... student and now president of Amigent; former Georgia Tech graduate students Rahul Sathe and Laura-Lee Farrell; and current graduate students David bark and Prem Midha. Individuals with chronic venous insufficiency are commonly prescribed therapies including anticoagulants, bed rest and ...

Book's plea: Save the bonobos

... famed primatologist Jane Goodall. Goodenough forged collaborations with the book's participants, but also with field scientists, and created Blue bark Press to get the work in print. The book sells for $19.95 and can be purchased on this Web site: www.bonobokids.org . All profits from I'm Lucy go ...

Mystery of infamous 'New England Dark Day' solved by tree rings

... massive wildfires burning in Canada. "A fire comes along and heat goes through the bark, killing the living tissue. A couple of years later, the bark falls off revealing the wood and an injury to the tree. When looking at the rings, you see charcoal formation on the outside and a resin formation on ...

Mystery of infamous 'New England Dark Day' solved by 3 rings

... massive wildfires burning in Canada. "A fire comes along and heat goes through the bark, killing the living tissue. A couple of years later, the bark falls off revealing the wood and an injury to the tree. When looking at the rings, you see charcoal formation on the outside and a resin formation on ...

Pioneering landscape-scale research releases first findings

... obtained on the experimental forest. Controlled burns had little effect on the growth of large trees, but killed or weakened some smaller ones. bark beetles were also more likely to colonize these weakened trees and therefore cause higher tree mortality. The team also discovered a genus and ...

Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History reveals ants as fungus farmers

... Agriculture is very rare in the animal world, said Schultz. We only know of four animal groups that have discovered agriculture: ants, termites, bark beetles and humans. By studying certain fungus-growing ants, which our study indicates are almost like living fossils, we might be able to better ...

Conservation strategies must shift with global environmental change, says CU-Boulder study

... at CU-Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. Such projects could include "reassembling" forest ecosystems in the West devastated by bark beetles, replanting them with bug-resistant trees and introducing vegetation that absorbs large amounts of carbon dioxide and filters ...

Computer learns dogspeak

... ball and play. The barks were recorded with a tape recorder before being transferred to the computer, where they were digitalized and individual bark sounds were coded, classified and evaluated. In the first experiment looking at classification of barks into different situations, the software ...

Scientists find how amber becomes death trap for watery creatures

... prehistoric demise of the water bugs by taking a handsaw to a swamp on Dilchers property near Gainesville in north Central Florida. After they cut bark from some pine trees, the resin flowed into the water and they collected the goo and took it back to Dilchers lab on campus. Stuck in the sticky ...

Agent that triggers immune response in plants is uncovered

... is a modified form of salicylic acid (SA), which has been used for centuries to relieve fever, pain and inflammation, first through the use of willow bark and, since 1889, with aspirin, still the most widely used drug worldwide. In the 1990s, Klessig's research group reported that SA and nitric oxide ...

Scientist-evangelical Alaska expedition

... glacial ice, and at the Kenai Peninsula, where more than three million acres of spruce forests have been killed by exploding populations of Spruce bark Beetles, brought on by warming temperatures. During the week-long expedition the group will meet with scientists, physicians, local church ...

Tropical insects 'go the distance' to inform rainforest conservation

... Paupua, New Guinea. Cognato and Hulcr were key collaborators on the project because of their expertise related to the biology and ecology of the bark and ambrosia beetle family, a model group of insects compoprised of 6,000 species worldwide, and one common to tropical rain forests. What we ...

Researchers discover key gene involved in bark beetle pheromone production

... decade-long controversy over the process by which bark beetles make pheromones: they manufacture their ... of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). bark beetles plague pine forests, especially when the ... Lake Tahoe basin lost 30 percent of its pines to bark beetle infestation during the 1986-1994 drought, ...

Alien woodwasp, threat to US pine trees, found in N.Y.

... Hoebeke was sifting through thousands of bark beetles caught in routine screening traps set by ... program, in search of any of 10 exotic species of bark beetles, when he stumbled across the specimen of ... fungus when the female lays her eggs through the bark and into the sapwood of the tree. "If S. ...

Underlying cause of massive pinyon pine die-off revealed

... temperatures set the trees up to be susceptible to insect infestations. bark beetles delivered the knock-out punch. "It was the drought - beetles ... dryness put the trees under so much water stress that the attacks from bark beetles finished them off. Under such conditions, the trees cannot make ...

Woods Hole Research Center plans controlled burn in Amazon rainforest

... through 'girdling' of their trunks ?the fire lingered close to their thin bark long enough to damage the delicate cambium beneath, permanently cutting ... and the leaves. While most trees in this ecosystem never evolved thick bark to protect themselves from fire, some appear more vulnerable to fire than ...

Mayo Clinic collaboration mining of ancient herbal text leads to potential new anti-bacterial drug

... that aspirin derived originally from willow bark, and the molecular basis of the anti-cancer chemotherapeutic agent Taxol TM was derived from the bark of the Pacific yew tree. So it's not so far-fetched to think that the contributions of an ancient text and insights from traditional medicine really ...

Study shows pine bark naturally decreases severe chronic venous insufficiency

... of chronic venous insufficiency (CVI) in patients after supplementing with Pycnogenol® (pic-noj-en-all), an antioxidant plant extract from the bark of the French maritime pine tree. Over 35 years of research on Pycnogenol® demonstrate the antioxidant's ability to improve blood flow and ...

Natural pine bark extract relieves muscle cramp and pain in athletes and diabetics

... A study published in this month's issue of Angiology shows that supplementation with the pine bark extract Pycnogenol® (pic-noj-en-all) improves blood flow to the muscles which speeds recovery after physical exercise. The study of 113 participants ...

Traditional Chinese medicine for diabetes has scientific backing

... Garvan Institute, has revealed that the natural plant product berberine could be a valuable new treatment. Berberine is found in the roots and bark of a number of plants used for medicinal purposes including woundhealing and treatment of diarrhoea. It has also been documented in Chinese ...

New organic substrate

... through two or three defibreing processes while FIBRALUR substrate is the result of a single defibration. During this defibration process the bark of the pine is subjected to a washing in water at a temperature of 90-115 ºC, the resulting cellulose being practically pure, free of phytotoxic ...

Sweetgum tree could help lessen shortage of bird flu drug

... can be found as far west as Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma and northward in parts of Illinois. Although shikimic acid is found in the leaves and bark of the tree, it is most abundant in the fruit, Poon says. In the mature tree, the fruit emerges as a green seedpod that later dries into a brown, ...

Drunken elephants: The marula fruit myth

... the authors. Instead, the authors posit that an intoxicant other than alcohol may be responsible for "tipsy" behavior. Elephants also eat the bark of the marula tree, which is home to a beetle pupae traditionally used to poison arrow tips. ...