A Tiny Bug Is Upsetting Shenandoah National Park’s Ecosystem
By Kurt Repanshek
Editor's note: The spine of the Appalachian Range runs north and south through the Mid- and South-Atlantic states, a rumpled stretch of mountains that long has provided a corridor for species. One uninvited species, the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid, arrived in 1951, and since then has attacked hemlock forests once commonplace in Shenandoah National Park, the Blue Ridge Parkway, and Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Since 1988 the National Park Service has been battling the tiny insect, and has met with varying success in those three parks. While much work remains to be done, there is optimism some of the hemlock stands will be saved. In the following stories, we take a look at the campaign.
Sunlight sifts through the forest’s canopy and falls upon our shoulders, easily penetrating an area of Shenandoah National Park once esteemed for its thick, almost ferny canopy, as Rolf Gubler and I amble down the Limberlost Trail.
Instead of towering, 100-foot (and even taller) Eastern hemlocks casting shade, we pass through sun-dappled thickets of black birch and underbrush dominated by mountain laurel.
Here and there a lone hemlock still stands, though there are the remains of over 1,000 of these magnificent trees, which once reached high into the sky in this pocket of the park. A non-native insect killed these trees, in just a few years, which led the National Park Service in 2003 to cut them down to keep them from falling on unsuspecting hikers. Now tree trunks and stumps line both sides of the trail, slowly moldering into the forest floor.
“We’re talking hundreds of thousands of trees,” says Gubler, a biologist who is the park’s forest pest manager, when asked how many hemlocks the park once held. Of those hemlock forests, “We’ve lost about 95 percent of our trees.”
Hundreds of healthy Eastern hemlock trees once lined the Limberlost Trail in Shenandoah National Park/NPS
Once a stalwart of Eastern forests from Canada to Georgia, hemlocks thrive in low-light settings. They are renowned pockets of biodiversity, as their short, tightly spaced needles shade the understory and keep it from drying out.
Though not as long-lived as Bristlecone pines or sequoias (which can survive for 3,000-5,000 years) mature hemlocks nevertheless are no youngsters. They reach maturity in 250-300 years and can live another 500 years or so.
Hemlocks have long have been valued in the Appalachians, prized for their bark, which was sought by the leather industry for its tannins, and their pulp for use by the paper industry.
But in 1951 a speck of an insect, the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid, was spotted in Virginia. It’s believed that the bug (which measures about one-16th of an inch long) hitchhiked to the United States aboard some ornamental plants imported from Japan. While it wasn’t considered a threat to Japan’s hemlock forests because of natural predators, and a natural deterrent in Asian hemlocks themselves, the bug has been devastating to hemlock stands in the Southeast.
What these insects do, essentially, is feed on the trees’ sap, “depleting the hemlock’s starch reserves, which in turn reduces the tree’s ability to grow and produce new shoots,” according to a 2004 report prepared by the U.S. Forest Service and the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station.
Invasive species are steadily invading the National Park System, from zebra mussels that can kill native mussels and disrupt stream biodiversity; salt cedar (also called tamarisk) that overruns native willows and cottonwoods along river bottoms; emerald ash borers, which kill ash trees; and the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid.
Today the adelgids have impacted a long swath of hemlocks from Shenandoah through the Blue Ridge Parkway and deep into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina. The aphid-like adelgids were first noticed in the Blue Ridge Parkway in 2003, a year after they were detected in the Great Smoky Mountains. Efforts to rid the parks of the damaging insects have met with a range of results. For instance, the Blue Ridge Parkway might not need to chemically treat trees this year to stop the adelgids.
There are some parts of the National Park System in the Eastern United States where the insects haven’t established themselves. One is Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, where graceful stands of hemlocks soar out of gorges in northern areas of the park.
Hemlock forests never dominated Shenandoah, but exist in pockets, unlike Great Smoky with its larger groves. The Limberlost area was one such pocket. This part of Shenandoah was so lush with hemlocks, some 3-4 feet in diameter, that they formed a sort of arboreal fairyland. Prior to the park’s establishment, George Freeman Pollock and his wife, Addie Nairn Pollock, saved 100 of the largest hemlocks that were growing here by paying loggers $10 per tree not to cut them down. (“Limberlost” was attached[K3] to the area by Mr. Pollock, who pulled the name from a novel about a young woman who lived on the edge of the Limberlost Swamp in Indiana.)
The impact of the adelgid infestation is easily visible along the Limberlost Trail. The forest canopy is patchy at best, and in places the trail tunnels through arching stands of black birch. Less visible are the impacts to the forest ecosystem. A healthy hemlock forest acts as a sort of humidifier for the forest, keeping temperatures cooler than forests with more open canopies, and sheltering moist soils.
The Hemlock Woolly Adelgid is easy to see on the underside of hemlock branches/Jane Schneider
“You have ferns and things like that and mosses growing in the understory, (it’s) very moist,” Gubler says as we survey the surrounding forest. “And you disturb that and then you’ve got hardwood species in here now.
“If you look around, look at the understory. It’s much drier. You don’t see ferns very much,” he continues. “You see a few. You don’t see as many mosses. In terms of stream water temperatures, you’re seeing increases in stream temperatures wherever we lose hemlocks along waterways.”
A bit further down the Limberlost Trail a bridge carries us across Whiteoak Canyon Run. Without the shade of hemlocks, the park’s thin creeks and streams warm easily under the sun’s rays, creating temperatures that impact the native brook trout.
“I think over time you’re going to see changes, species that exist there, things like brook trout. It’s going to have an effect on brook trout. They need cool water. They need shaded water with a high oxygen content,” the biologist explains.
Even bird species that normally flit through Shenandoah’s forests are affected by the adelgid. Blackburnian warblers, winter wrens, and Blue-headed vireos that prefer spruce/fir/hemlock forests are not showing up as often in bird surveys along the Limberlost Trail and around Rapidan Camp on the Rapidan River. Hardwood forests are taking over.
“The park’s just not offering that spruce/fir/hemlock dynamic that we used to be able to, so those species have to go elsewhere to find that mixture,” says Gubler. “We’re just seeing fewer of those specific birds.”
Park staff has aggressively been fighting the adelgid since 1996 with both chemical soil treatments and spraying. Last year, they introduced a predatory beetle native to Japan believed to only feed on the adelgid.
“The Laricobius nigrinus, which has been in use probably for the last 12 years, that species is pretty darn host specific,” the biologist says. “The new species that we’ve started to release in the park, Laricobius osakensis, that is very host specific to HWA, and we feel that that host specificity allows us to be pretty comfortable with using it as a bio-control.”
Before the beetles were available, park crews injected imidacloprid, an insect neurotoxin, into the soil for uptake into the hemlocks through their roots. They’ve also sprayed insecticidal soaps onto the trees.
Until the adelgid was first spotted in the park, in the fall of 1988, Eastern hemlocks covered roughly 9,800 acres of the park. After 2003, however, hemlocks remained in only about 500 acres scattered throughout the park. Since the park shifted to imidacloprid soil treatments in 2005, they have been able to treat roughly 2,000-2,500 hemlocks per year and reverse hemlock crown decline in many previously untreated areas (especially in more remote areas). When looking at treated hemlocks in the park now, they are healthier than they have been in the past 15-20 years.
“Over the last 10 or 12 years we’ve been doing soil injections of imidacloprid. We’ve treated about 24,000 hemlock trees,” says Gubler. “We’re on a seven- or eight-year treatment cycle, so I think we can certainly keep those trees preserved and protected over time. We hope to eventually switch over to bio-controls so we can get off of that pesticide cycle.”
To monitor the effectiveness of the program, crews check the health of hemlock crowns.
“We’re looking at the decline or the improvement of crown health in hemlocks. We do that by assessing the live crown of treated hemlocks over time,” explains Gubler.
Today there are perhaps 30,000-40,000 hemlocks of various sizes left in Shenandoah, a small number compared to the 800,000 or so hemlocks that existed before the adelgid arrived. While it would be overly optimistic to think the park would ever again see such a high number of hemlocks, Gubler is optimistic that the adelgid can be successfully countered and won’t wipe out the park’s remaining hemlock stands.
“I think bio-controls, predatory beetles, is our best bet,” he said.
Stands of dead hemlocks can be found in Great Smoky Mountains National Park/Jane Schneider
Great Smoky Mountains National Park’s Fight To Save Hemlocks
By Jane Schneider
Fourteen years after the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid invaded Shenandoah National Park, it had made its way almost 500 miles south to Great Smoky Mountains National Park . By then, in 2002, forester Jesse Webster and his staff at Great Smoky had developed one of the country’s most ambitious adelgid treatment programs.
Initially, they mapped 87,000 acres of hemlock stands interlaced across more than 522,000 acres of the park. Next Webster and his team assessed the overall health of the each stand and its proximity to the park’s front country. Areas like roadways and hiking trails that most directly impact visitors received highest priority for treatment.
Infested hemlocks were tagged for chemical intervention, a regimen that requires an insecticide (similar to that in flea collars) to be injected into the bark of a tree, or as a soil drenching “pour” around the base of a tree. Sprayer trucks at times also are used to treat the trees’ foliage. Webster acknowledges such treatments can be an effective short-term approach, stopping the sudden loss of trees, but they don’t keep trees from being re-infested. Better is when the weather cooperates, since extreme periods of cold can kill off large numbers of adelgids.
“This won’t be the next chestnut blight,” Webster says, referring to the devastation of American chestnuts to a fungus during the early 1900s. Instead, he remains cautiously optimistic as we tour the grove. “We’ve done something and taken the initial steps to make sure that won’t happen.”
So far, more than 100 areas have been treated These include campgrounds, picnic grounds, parking lots at trailheads, and major watersheds — roughly 250,000 trees. Some sites, like Parsons Road, are currently closed to public entry due to the infestation. Here, more than 1,700 trees along the roadway have been impacted, creating a potential safety hazard for visitors; once affected trees die, the trunk becomes spongy to the touch and trees can easily fall.
To see their work up close, we drive to the Elkmont Campground, a destination that includes Daisy Town, a historic collection of vacation cabins (no longer in use) that date to the 1920s and are tied to the park’s inception. At this biocontrol site, Webster guides me to a tree on the perimeter of a nearby field. Pulling out a long hemlock branch and turning over the needles, he shows me a dusting of white, lint-like growth that dots the underside of the branch.
“That is the woolly adelgid,” he says.
It turns out the adelgid is an efficient killer. Once the pest gains a foothold, by inserting a straw-like proboscis into the hemlock’s needle, it sucks out nutrients, often felling a mature tree in three to five years. “Ninety-eight percent of the hemlocks in Elkmont would now be dead had they not been treated,” says the forester.
But it is a race against time. The adelgid multiplies quickly, completing two generations a year. With no natural predators in the Smokies, its transference from one host tree to the next is rarely deterred. And one treatment typically lasts just five to seven years.
“The natural predator/prey balance isn’t in place here,” said Webster. “There’s no natural check for the adelgid, so the threat of losing the forest is real.”
To bring about that balance, the Park Service has introduced four different non-native beetles that prey on adelgid in hopes of curtailing its growth biologically. Since this is still in the experimental phase, just how the beetles will impact the overall ecosystem remains unknown.
“We’re releasing the beetles on smaller trees to increase their numbers. They’ve become established and are reproducing, but are they controlling the adelgid? We’re trying to put a number on that now,” says Webster. But the forester does know one thing: “Chemical treatment is a stop-gap approach, beetles are a long-term landscape approach.”
Hemlocks are one of the Smoky Mountain’s foundation species and the only shade-tolerant conifer in the forest. The loss of this species can cause a significant shift in the ecosystem, since the hemlock’s presence enables shade-loving plants to flourish on the forest floor, and helps to keep streambeds cool. “When a tree dies, sunlight comes to the forest floor; that hasn’t occurred in hundreds of years,” he says. “Hemlocks also moderate stream flow as they transpire through the year. They don’t go dormant, they use water year-round so there’s less water retention in droughts.”
As we hike along Grassy Branch Trail further away from Elkmont, it becomes easier to spot the devastation of trees left untreated. Stripped of their needles, clusters of hemlocks stand like ghostly grey sentinels no longer able to sustain and protect the forest around them.
Blue Ridge Parkway crews believed they've turned the corner in their battle with the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid/NPS, Chris Ulrey
Blue Ridge Parkway Ready To Turn Adelgid Control Over To Beetles
By Kurt Repanshek
Cascading 150 feet, Linville Falls in North Carolina kicks up quite a spray, one the surrounding hemlock trees relish. The moisture contributes to the hemlocks’ natural ability, through their dense canopy, to keep the forest relatively humid and the soil on the moist side.
“There’s some really old-growth hemlocks in there, both of those species are there,” says Chris Ulrey, a plant ecologist for the Blue Ridge Parkway, referring to both Eastern hemlocks and rare Carolina hemlocks. “Just taking the trail out to the falls you can see a lot of live trees, as well as many dead trees.”
Unlike Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains national parks, the Blue Ridge Parkway seems to be turning the corner on rebounding from a devastating infestation of Hemlock Woolly Adelgids. Though the adelgids killed roughly half of the hemlocks that once covered 9,000-12,000 acres of the 93,390-acre Parkway, Ulrey and his crews have treated about 15,000 individual hemlocks with the insecticide imidacloprid and have met relatively good success.
“In 2017, we’re not going to do any chemical treatment,” he says. Instead, the park will let predatory beetles, Laricobius osakensis, carry on the battle against the adelgid.
“The reason we’re starting to feel optimistic, the plan was to chemically control initially while establishing all these beetles, and the beetles would gradually build up in size until they become kind of in equilibrium with the adelgid population and they would keep that adelgid population in check,” explains Ulrey.
“And now with lots of hemlock mortality, in combination with the cold winters, the adelgid population has dropped. These beetles that are out there are in better proportion (to the adelgids),” he continues. “Our plan all along was chemically treat initially, establish these beetles, and then some point in the future we would be able to taper off on the chemicals and totally leave it to the beetles.
“I think we’re in that early stage of turning it over to the beetles.”
If the beetles continue to neutralize the effects of the adelgid, the next step at the Blue Ridge Parkway will be to devise a reforestation plan for the hemlocks.
“That’s the really long-term plan. The chemically treated trees are going to be the only trees left alive. Everything else is going to die,” says Ulrey. “The adelgid population crashes, the beetles stand a better chance of keeping the adelgid population in check. We stop the chemical treatments. And then the trees that are alive are going to become the seed source. Their offspring are going to be spread throughout the region and replace those dead trees.
“We figure in about 200-300 years we’ll be back to normal.”
Healthy hemlock groves can be found in Mammoth Cave National Park/NPS
Deep In The Backcountry Of Mammoth Cave National Park Hemlocks Flourish
By Kurt Repanshek
While Hemlock Woolly Adelgid beetles are attacking hemlock groves and forests in Shenandoah, Great Smoky Mountains and the Blue Ridge Parkway, deep in the sheltered coves of Mammoth Cave National Park grow hundreds, perhaps thousands, of green, healthy hemlocks.
Scattered across roughly 600 acres in the northwestern corner of this 52,800-acre park, the trees flourish due to their isolation in deep, dark, moist coves.
“There are about 10 disjointed populations, all located fairly close together but separated by ridge tops or other geographic features,” says Larry Johnson, a research management specialist at Mammoth Cave. “Each of these populations contains anywhere from a few dozen to perhaps a few hundred hemlocks, ranging from small saplings to very large, mature trees
These hemlocks, he went on, are a remnant population from the last ice age, 10,000-15,000 years ago. While the rest of Mammoth Cave’s landscape has changed due to logging for large, shade species and the loss of the American chestnut, these trees have managed to hang on, says Johnson.
“They’re generally very specific to where they want to be, and they don’t get outside of that area of the park where it’s dark and wet,” he says.
Their health, in comparison to the hemlocks in the other three parks, stems from their location.
“Mammoth Cave National Park is somewhat of an island. If you Google it and look at it, we’re surrounded by miles and miles and miles of agricultural development and roads,” points out Johnson. “Mammoth Cave is this green island that’s by itself. We’re not adjacent to any other hemlock populations.”
And without those other hemlock populations, he continued, the adelgids don’t have a way to reach the hemlocks growing in the coves.
“We do constant monitoring of all the (hemlock) populations,” Johnson says. “The adelgids are easy to see. It’s obvious. If you turn the leaf over, limb over, it almost looks like little white soldiers. It’s very, very easy to see and you can detect it.
“…We do really watch for it, and so far keeping our fingers crossed that lady luck will stay with us.”
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Comments
You've obviously put a lot of time into this article, Kurt and the perspectives from throughout the NPS system paint a broad picture of a problem I am afraid we are powerless to stop. Here in the Smokies, many hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent waging chemical warfare against this pestilence but it seems to be of little value. I was told by a biologist I met atop Mt. Rogers two years ago that all we can do is enjoy them while they are here. He insinuated that he has studied this blight for years in graduate school and the adelgid will eventually have its day and the Hemlock will go the way of the Chestnut giants.
I hope he is wrong, but a stroll through Albright Grove seems to suggest otherwise. Thanks for taking the time to go in depth.
Hope springs eternal, John. Even for the American Chestnut!
https://caldwelljournal.com/chestnut-restoration-may-be-happening/
I have to say I am more optimistic about the future of hemlock, especially in the Great Smokies. The chemical controls are very effective. Losses of hemlocks you see in the Smokies are due to the initial wave of mortality, which impacted the oldest trees the most and overwhelmed control efforts. The drought of 2007-08 impaired the tree's ability to uptake the systemic chemical but that was the last last wave of hemlock mortality. With biocontols documented as established and spreading the future is bright. Chemical controls cannot be relied on forever and the future is biocontrol and occassional cold temperature winter kill. Enjoy places like Cosby nature trail and Low Gap trail, which are virtually undamaged by HWA. Other places have impacts but the trees are holding their own now that the initial wave of mortality has passed.