Mountain pine beetles, an invasive fungus, and climate change—is whitebark pine doomed?

The Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/ Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation: https://whitebarkfound.org/ American Chestnut book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520259942/american-chestnut Documentary about Ranger Doug: https://www.instagram.com/rangerdougfilm/ Pictures of whitebark pine: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmWJ2S4F Ben Cosgrove Music: https://www.bencosgrove.com/

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

[pensive guitar music playing]

Emma: They kind of look a little bit like nicotine patches for trees [giggling]. Like sugar packets, I guess might be a nicer thing to say.

Peri: [amused] Wait, what is going on here?

Michael: Well, recently, Andrew and I tagged along on a hike to Scenic Point with the veg crew, the park's plant people. And shortly after reaching the top, I was handed a Bosstitch heavy duty stapler and a small white packet.

Peri: The nicotine patch, a.k.a. sugar packet.

Michael: Yes, which, turns out, it's actually a packet of a synthetic pheromone called verbenone, which is a defense against one of the west's most infamous forest pests: mountain pine beetles.

Peri: Ohhhh.

Michael: We don't want them killing our whitebark pine trees, so we were sent out there to staple verbenone packets, these synthetic pheromones right onto the trees themselves. Here's re-veg crewmember Annie Gustavson walking me through it.

[quiet, joyful music begins]

Annie: OK, you're going to take the packet of verbenone and you're just going to put two staples up top and then one down below.

Michael: OK. How hard do you have to swing this thing to get it to.

Annie: Five miles an hour.

Andrew: [Laughs]

Michael: [laughing] That's impossible to judge, by hand? Oh, it even says "staple here.".

Andrew: Here we go.

Michael: Don't hype it up. [Staple sound]

Andrew: Nice. [Staple]

Andrew: [deadpan] Ok, now here's the tough one, bottom staple. [Staple]

Michael: Is that good enough?

Annie: Yeah

Andrew: So what grade would you give him? [everyone laughing]

Annie: You got a B-plus.

Michael: Easier said than done. [Stapling sounds].

Andrew: Oh no!

Michael: That was a misfire, [everyone laughing] there was no staple!

Annie: That one was a D.

Peri: So how do these packets keep the beetles away?

Michael: Well, I'll let Rebecca Lawrence explain. She runs the re-veg program around here and is an excellent verbenone stapler, I might add.

Rebecca: Well, it tells the beetles that other beetles have occupied that tree—no, no vacancies—so that they'll go somewhere else to another tree.

Peri: Very clever. So they're using the beetles' own language against them.

Michael: Exactly. And the goal is to place these no vacancy signs at the outer edges of important high-elevation forests, a sort of “great wall of sugar packets” that keeps the beetles out.

Peri: [laughing] Okay, I like it. And did it work?

Michael: It seemed like it. I mean, we never saw any beetles when we were up there. But we did see evidence of a different threat. Here's Rebecca again.

Rebecca: This is active rust where the cankers are opening up and releasing the spores. And it's a bright orange that looks like your Kraft mac and cheese powder.

Michael: Throughout the Rocky Mountains, whitebark pine trees are dying, and here in Glacier, beetles are far from the largest problem.

Rebecca: Basically, the bark starts to just erupt open and then the spores pop out.

Michael: These trees are being protected from beetles because up until now, at least, they've been doing great at surviving an entirely different disease: white pine blister rust, which has already killed over half of the whitebark pine trees in the park. These big, mature cone-bearing trees have been showing resistance to the disease for decades, and the crew has been visiting and “verbenone-ing” them since 2007. [Headwaters Season 2 theme begins to play: somber, dramatic piano music] But today, the crew noticed blister rust on several, turning what should have been an annual wellness check into a sort of inevitable goodbye.

Rebecca: It's—it's sad to see, you know… I don't like to see them dying off, but it's not surprising. Even if just a fraction of them survive, hopefully we can maintain a little foothold up here.

[theme music finishes]

Peri: My name is Peri, and this is season two of Headwaters. We're calling this season Whitebark Pine. But this story is also about so much more than a tree. It's about the purpose of national parks and our relationship with the places we love.

Andrew: I'm Andrew.

Michael: I'm Michael.

Andrew: Hopefully, you've already listened to chapters one and two. But if you haven't, those are a great place to start.

Michael: This is chapter three of a five-part season.

Peri: So far, we've introduced you to whitebark pine, learned about its cultural significance, and heard about the intricate web of life that's connected to this tree. Now we meet the things trying to kill it. So, Michael.

Michael: Mmhmm?

Peri: Hearing about your field day with Rebecca makes me think of this quote by Aldo Leopold, the famous conservationist. He said "one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds." [sparse, sad music begins to play] I'm realizing that a lot of this whitebark pine story is invisible, something that a layperson wouldn't even notice, but that's a catastrophe to an ecologist and the world's they study.

Michael: Definitely. I mean, I would have never noticed the blister rust on those trees if Rebecca hadn't pointed it out.

Peri: And I'm no ecologist. But as I learn more about whitebark pine, I think I'm starting to get a glimpse of what it feels like to see these hidden tragedies unfolding. In chapter one, I asked hikers on the Piegan Pass trail if they knew what whitebark pine were, and most of them didn't, even though we were standing right next to a ghost forest of dead whitebark. I felt like I was seeing a world they weren't.

[music finishes]

Peri: Professor Diana Six is an ecologist at the University of Montana who studies the threats facing whitebark pine. And today, I'm going to hike back up the Piegan Pass trail with her. We're going to find a big, healthy whitebark pine and core it, to look at the rings, see what it's been through, and ask why it survived.

[pensive music marks a transition to the field]

Diana: So, yeah, my name is Diana Six, and I'm a professor of forest entomology and pathology. I really did start my love of nature in insects as a little kid. I was camping when I was in diapers. I've been out in the forest, in the desert, you know, all my life.

Peri: [in the field] So I'm just envisioning five year old Diana. [expansive synth music beings] Did you bring all these bugs into the house? What did your parents think about it?

Diana: Oh yeah, everything came in the house. I collected, the most famous thing that put some controls on me was I brought home all these little wigglers and put them in my aquarium. And of course, they were mosquitoes. And when they hatched, I was in big trouble, and after that I wasn't allowed to bring live stuff in the house anymore. You know, I begged for a microscope for years and I always got these stupid dolls. I am old enough that in those days, women were not encouraged in science. We weren't even allowed to be in the science club, so I never, ever considered that it could have been a career that I could have gone on to do science or bugs, for sure.

Peri: You might think of a forest entomologist and pathologist as a bit of a nerd, but Diana is very cool. She has all this amazing, insect-themed silver jewelry and listens to heavy symphonic metal, works all over the world, and is very far from the stereotype I imagined. As we hiked up the trail, I asked her what whitebark pine is up against.

[pensive synth music begins]

Diana: So the three main threats really to whitebark are climate change, blister rust, and mountain pine beetle. And the fact that we have those three, and they're all big, makes this a particularly wicked problem. And wicked problems are those kinds that are not only difficult to solve, but they have multiple facets. And so one aspect could be really difficult to fix. But if you come up with a solution for that, you're still going to lose what you're focused on, because you still have these other threats that have to be dealt with.

Peri: And the other thing that makes this a wicked problem is that these threats interact. For example, climate change is enabling beetles to attack whitebark pin.

Diana: Mountain pine beetles are native, which surprises some people because they've killed so many trees. They act like some invasive, but they're native

Peri: In a way, mountain pine beetles are new to whitebark. Beetle larvae are killed by really cold temperatures, which used to be common in the high elevation areas where these trees live.

Diana: But with climate change, it's allowed things to warm up, the beetles could move up the mountain now, and now they're—it's warm enough on the tops of the mountains all of the time that the beetles can persist there, pretty much as residents now. And this is a big problem because whitebark, having been protected for so many years, has never really had to evolve strong defenses against this insect. And so when this insect shows up, it doesn't have a really good way of fighting back. So if you go to lower elevation trees, they've got all this resin they produce. They drown the beetles, they produce all these toxic chemicals. Whitebark doesn'