A few nights ago I was in Red Deer, Alberta, to watch Dr.Janice Cooke speak at one of the regular Wednesday night science evenings at the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery. Janice is the co-leader of our Tria Project which is looking into Mountain Pine Beetle system genomics.
The beetle has chewed its way through much of British Columbia's pine forests and has already made a meal of an estimated million and a half Alberta trees. The relationship between the beetle, the pine tree, and the blue-stain fungus  is not well understood by scientists or the forest industry. (who knew there is actually 9 fungi species at work)
As I've discovered since we launched the project in January, the general public, media, and many policy makers do not realise that there is even a fungus at work in the epidemic. They are even more in the dark about the fact that the fungus is as fatal to the tree as the beetle, and may even be more damaging.
So we jump at the chance to take the 'show and tell' on the road whenever we can.

There were about 25 people in the room and Janice started the evening off by passing around a bottle o' beetles (well pickled of course!) collected from the Canmore area. They're just tiny little critters about the size of a long rice grain. For most of the audience it was their first up close and personal experience with the MPB and for a couple of people there was that 'a-ha' moment where they now knew what to look for in their own forested areas.

While I knew that the wee beastie was native to our Western Canadian forests I was a bit surprised to learn this wasn't the first worrisome outbreak. In fact the Canadian Forest Service was established in the twenties to combat one of these previous outbreaks. Back then they lacked our modelling or research tools, pheromone packs, or helicopters to do extensive survey or manage controlled burns.  Yet the problem disappeared and it begs the question one young woman in the crowd asked - namely can't we simply let nature take its course, let the beetle move on, and let the hardy trees survive.
The answer it would appear really is a sign that the times are a changin'. Fire suppression, warmer winters, extensive logging, monoculture, and politics all now play a factor.
 
The audience really wanted to know more about what genomics has to do with it all however, and as I've been doing press releases and setting up media interviews I must admit to wondering if the answer is still a bit vague.
Janice to the rescue.
She did a great job of explaining to everyone that Alberta has been using models based on conditions in British Columbia which are simply not the same. As a result we've been wrong in many cases about the beetle's movements. Using CSI-style genetic fingerprinting we can figure out how beetles are related to the ones on the tree next door, down the road, or several counties away. This helps understand how they spread and can help predict where they are going next.

We don't know much about the cold weather protection mechanisms of the beetle, don't know how the beetles communicate to let other beetles know the tree buffet is open, how they find each other for reproductive purposes, how the tree knows to release certain toxins into the sap to kill or deter the beetle, what it is about certain trees that enable them to withstand an infestation, and the list goes on and on.
Genomics is not a silver bullet Janice pointed out but it will bring us much closer to finding ways to head this epidemic off or to deal with similar epidemics in other parts of the world.
As Project Manager Matt Bryman pointed out to me some time ago, we need to understand what's at work before we can ever hope to deal with it. (check out Matt's blog on our pages as well )
As of last week the numbers are up in certain areas and it is clear the problem isn't going away as some people have suggested. When asked if there way anything they could do Janice's best advice (to the general public at least) wa to go home and start by telling someone about what they learned. Tell your parents, spouse or kids. Doesn't matter. Anything we can do to raise awareness with politicians, media, industry or land owners will help.
The Tria project website will be fully functional in a few weeks at www.thetriaproject.ca and we already have a few pages up here on our own site with some MPB information, the latest being a CBC Radio interview Janice did.
Check it out and be sure to tell 2 friends and ask them to tell 2 friends and so on, and so on, and ...