It isn’t much bigger than a grain of rice, but in the numbers that are invading Alberta, the Mountain Pine Beetle is making a meal of Alberta’s vast forests. More than a million and a half trees in the province have been affected so far, and unless winter temperatures drop enough to kill the beetle, the problem will continue to grow. However we now have a almost 6 million dollars set to invest into getting to an understanding of the problem at a very basic level.

Over the past few years, the small black beetles have been expanding east into Alberta from British Columbia to enjoy our increasingly mild winters. Once a beetle finds a suitable tree in July or August, it settles down for the rest of its life to eat and lay eggs. The new generation of beetles will not emerge from the tree for at least a year and by that time, there is a high probability the tree will be dead and the new generation will pack up and move on to find more healthy trees to snack on. The beetles attack and kill mature pine trees including lodge pole, jack pine, Scots pine, and ponderosa pine.

 It isn’t much bigger than a grain of rice, but in the numbers that are invading Alberta, the Mountain Pine Beetle is making a meal of Alberta’s vast forests. More than a million and a half trees in the province have been affected so far, and unless winter temperatures drop enough to kill the beetle, the problem will continue to grow. However we now have a almost 6 million dollars set to invest into getting to an understanding of the problem at a very basic level.

Over the past few years, the small black beetles have been expanding east into Alberta from British Columbia to enjoy our increasingly mild winters. Once a beetle finds a suitable tree in July or August, it settles down for the rest of its life to eat and lay eggs. The new generation of beetles will not emerge from the tree for at least a year and by that time, there is a high probability the tree will be dead and the new generation will pack up and move on to find more healthy trees to snack on. The beetles attack and kill mature pine trees including lodge pole, jack pine, Scots pine, and ponderosa pine.

Here at Genome Alberta we’re becoming involved in the work to control the spread of the MBP thanks to a 4.1 million dollar investment from Alberta Advanced Education and Technology and Alberta Sustainable Resources. With research partners such as Genome British Columbia (who are contributing an additional 2 million dollars to the effort ) , University of Alberta, University of Northern British Columbia, and the University of British Columbia, we’re taking a new approach to the problem.

Apart from the damage the beet le does to the tree, the MPB also introduces blue stain fungi into the tree. The fungus is carried in the beetle’s mouth and it soon feeds on the tree’s living tissue, slows fluid movement and weakens the trees defense against the beetle.

Our project will look at the relationship between the tree, the beetle, and the fungi. An International Peer Review Panel was impressed with the unique approach and the idea of using genomics to better understand the outbreak.

When I asked our Chief Science Officer Gijs van Rooijen about the project he compared it to the human genome project – no, not in scale – but in the way the work will generate a host of genome resources including the sequencing of the blue-staining fungus. We’re also hoping that the integration of the genomic information of the beetle-fungus-tree relationship into computer models will predict how the pest is going to spread and so better cutting strategies can be developed.

The leader of the Alberta part of the project is Janice Cooke at the University of Alberta and we just hired Matt Bryman at the U of A as the Project Manager.

We’ll keep you up-to-date on the project activities and meanwhile here are a couple of new photographs of the destructive pest that were done by Jack Scott, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta.

If you’d like to see the hi-res version of the pictures you can visit Genome Alberta’s photo sharing site on Picasa.