USDA shows interest in recent Garden Club presenter’s findings

||| FROM CYNTHIA BRAST-BORMANN, ORCAS GARDEN CLUB PRESENTER |||    

The other day, I had an email pop up from someone over at the Orcas Island Garden Club that said someone from the USDA was trying to reach me. Backstory here. I gave a talk for the Orcas Island Garden Club a few months ago that was videotaped. The person trying to reach me evidently came across the recording and wrote to the garden club. Of course, my first thoughts were 1) am I in trouble? haha and 2) did I have a photo of some new, weird invasive species that they wanted to know about?

Uh-oh.

Nope. Not that at all. In fact, I connected with a very nice fella who wanted to know if I could ID these weird eggs his agency was finding on Eastern Hemlock trees that they had been worried were Hemlock Loopers. These were the mystery eggs I’d blogged about a few years earlier and finally figured out what species was laying them this fall when I sat out under the tree with a flashlight and my video camera.

This was the 2nd agency that had contacted me about finding eggs like the ones I’d found and wanting to know what they were. In case you are wondering, these mystery eggs were laid by the Yellow Underwing moth, Noctua pronuba. They weren’t even eating the needles on the tree, but rather dropping to the ground on little silk threads to reach host plants they prefer to eat (dandelions, dock, and a few others).

I was also able to share some photos and video of natural predators of the eggs. I recorded lacewing larvae and spiders that were eating the eggs or the newly hatched larvae. Texting back and forth with this USDA employee, I was able to share about my friend Laurel Ramseyer’s study counting spiders in fallen fir cones and he said he was really grateful to know about your paper, Laurel Ramseyer, because it would help him with a research publication he was working on. They want to know what natural predators are helping regulate pests in our forest ecosystems, and how we can support healthy forests by recognizing and supporting pest predators.

So, NOPE, I was not in trouble and in the end, I felt encouraged about this new generation of folks in the entomology community working together to address all the bad stuff in our forests because of climate change. There’s a LOT of work to do investigating minute details and interactions and figuring out how it all works together instead of grabbing cans of insecticide and relying on the agrochemical industry, which has undoubtedly contributed to a big part of the mess we are facing.

Nature does not always need us to interfere.