The introduced pest, Emerald Ash Borer (EAB), continues to devastate native ash trees by girdling and killing the host tree throughout half a million square kilometers of quarantined eastern North America. Traditional pest detection methods, including the use of ground/visual surveys and sticky traps, are costly, labour-intensive and at times destructive or impractical. But biosurveillance, using one species to survey for a pest species, can now complement biocontrol whereby one organism is used to control pest species. The powerful new surveillance tool is Cerceris fumipennis (Say), one of a family of native solitary wasps, includes the EAB as prey when provisioning its nests. Preliminary trials have shown that the wasp’s EAB detection abilities are unmatched by the corresponding human technology. Utilizing this wasp shifts pest monitoring from the conventional passive traps to a new active predator-prey approach.
The introduced pest, Emerald Ash Borer (EAB), continues to devastate native ash trees by girdling and killing the host tree throughout half a million square kilometers of quarantined eastern North America. Traditional pest detection methods, including the use of ground/visual surveys and sticky traps, are costly, labour-intensive and at times destructive or impractical. But biosurveillance, using one species to survey for a pest species, can now complement biocontrol whereby one organism is used to control pest species. The powerful new surveillance tool is Cerceris fumipennis (Say), one of a family of native solitary wasps, includes the EAB as prey when provisioning its nests. Preliminary trials have shown that the wasp’s EAB detection abilities are unmatched by the corresponding human technology. Utilizing this wasp shifts pest monitoring from the conventional passive traps to a new active predator-prey approach.