Month: June 2023

Killer

Beech leaf disease (BLD) has arrived in Cohasset. I’m seeing leaves on American Beeches withering and dropping off both in Wheelwright Park and in the Whitney Thayer Woods. In some places, stands of beeches have lost so many leaves that it no longer feels like you’re walking in the forest.

Withered leaves on an American Beech sapling.
American Beech sapling in Whitney Thayer woods with BLD

A scientific article from two and a half years ago — Sharon E. Reed, et al., “The distribution of beech leaf disease…,” Forest Ecology and Management, vol. 503, January, 2022 — found that BLD is a worse threat to American Beech stands than two previous invasive pathologies, beech scale (Cryptococcus fagisuga), and beech bark disease (C. fagisuga and Neonectria spp. complex).

Withered leaves on an American Beech sapling
American Beech sapling in Whitney Thayer Woods with BLD

An invasive nematode from east Asia, Litylenchus crenatae, is always present when BLD is present. But a scientific article from Sept., 2021 — Carrie J. Ewing et al., The Foliar Microbiome Suggests that Fungal and Bacterial Agents May be Involved in the Beech Leaf Disease Pathosystem, Phytobiomes Journal, pub. online 29 Sep 2021 — also found that organisms from four bacterial genera — Wolbachia, Erwinia, Paenibacillus, and Pseudomonas — and one fungal genus, Paraphaeosphaeria — are always present with the nematode when BLD is present.

A few withred leaves among healthy leaves in an American Beech sapling
American Beech sapling in Whitney Thayer Woods with BLD

From what I can gather, our understanding of BLD is still incomplete. However, a few things are quite clear. The University of Rhode Island suggests a couple of strategies to try to save trees from BLD: heavy applications of phosphite fetilizer twice a year, and/or application of pesticide to kill the nematodes. If trees with BLD are left untreated, they will die within 6 to 10 years. Since we cannot treat most trees in our forests, we can expect most infected American Beeches to die within a decade.

Yet another reason for eco-grief.

And this is another reminder that as dire as the situation might be with climate change, invasive species are also devastating our New England forest ecosystems. A hundred years ago, we lost our American Chestnuts to invasive Chestnut Blight. Fifty years ago, we lost most of our American Elms to invasive Dutch Elm Disease. We’re in the process of losing all our Eastern Hemlocks to an invasive insect, the Woolly Adelgid, and all our ash trees to another invasive insect, the Emerald Ash Borer. Now we’re losing all our American Beech trees to yet another invasive organism.

Yes we need to stop climate change, but that’s only a part of the threat to Earth’s life-supporting systems. There’s a lot of work for us to do….

UFOs

Actually, they’re no longer called Unidentified Flying Objects, but rather Unidentified Anamolous Phenomena (UAP). According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, there were 144 UAP reported from 2004 to 2021. Although these remain unexplained, possible explanations include: airborne clutter (including “airborne debris like plastic bags); natural atmospheric phenomena; “developments [by inudstry and government] and classified programs by U.S. entities”; “foreign adversary systems”; and other possible explanations.

NASA recently held a public meeting — a video of this meeting are now available on Youtube — to cut through the cult of secrecy that has long surrounded UFOs…um, I mean UAP. Previously, NASA has spent all its energy debunking UFO sightings. Now NASA is trying to be more open its data collection and data analysis efforts. So, as you’d expect, one of the questions they got during the public meeting was: “What is NASA hiding?”

No amount of public meetings is going to convince people that NASA has nothing to hide. Belief in UFOs is now a part of the U.S. mythos, and the mythos of other so-called developed countries. There are even New Religions Movements based on UFOs, most notably Raelism, for which the influence of extraterrestrial intelligence on humanity is integral to their worldview. Many of these New Religious Movements now downplay any mention of UFOs or alien intelligences (for example, Unarius Academy of Science and Scientology emphasize their self-development coursework, not UFOs). Nevertheless, belief in UFOs remains central to the U.S. mythos. One meeting my NASA is not going to dislodge this firmly-held belief.