Save a Tree, Play Rock and Roll?

Feb. 10, 2010 — -- Beetles that have destroyed millions of acres of trees across North America have defeated nearly every effort to disrupt their deadly march through the forests, but maybe that's just because nobody has been playing the right song.

Researchers at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff are patenting new technology that may turn beetle against beetle, causing males and females to devour each other instead of mating and killing their host tree.

So far, the technology has worked beautifully in the lab, according to entomologist Richard Hofstetter, so this summer he expects to learn if what works in the lab also works in the forest.

Hofstetter is taking an entirely new approach that is a departure from decades of experiments that have relied on pesticides and other chemicals to end the beetles' reign of terror. He is using sound to disrupt the beetles' lifestyle.

"When we first started we kind of wondered if anything would work," Hofstetter said in a telephone interview. The idea was to find a sound that would make a tree unattractive to the beetles. And they tried just about everything.

Reagan McGuire, a lab technician in NAU's Ecological Restoration Institute, began searching for the "nastiest, most offensive sound," and he came up with the voice of a radio personality he found particularly irritating But it didn't work.

So they tried rock and roll. No joy there either.

But Hofstetter, who has spent a lot of time studying beetle communication, understands how beetles talk to each other. Like most insects, they are influenced by various odors, but they also communicate extensively through noise. The right words, in beetle speak, might mess with their minds.

"It's very dark and smelly" inside a tree, he noted. "So sound is a good way for them to communicate."

Where do you find the right words? By listening to the beetles themselves. The researchers have compiled a large collection of beetle sounds -- males boasting to win the affection of a female, or warning other males to stay away, for example -- and they quickly learned that they could, indeed, talk to the beetles.