Roseau Cane Holds Together Much Of What's Left Of LA Delta; New Invasive Insect Is Destroying It
A swarm of tiny bugs with an enormous appetite has invaded the Louisiana marsh, and is sucking the life out of vegetation that helps keep the state’s fragile coast from further dissolving into the sea. Scientists and agricultural experts are teaming up to stop the parasites from destroying the critical Roseau cane, but they’re beset by a major problem: They don’t fully know what the bug is, so they don’t exactly know how to attack it, and their early ideas so far — fire, insecticides and possibly the release of a microscopic wasp that preys on the bug — will likely result in nasty side effects.
Louisiana State University entomologist Rodrigo Diaz said researchers only recently discovered the foreign family of insects to which the invasive species belongs, called Aclerdidae, which is native to Japan and China. But the lab tests that identified it couldn’t reveal how it arrived — on a ship, attached to a migrating bird or even on the wind.
What’s certain is that last year a team of surveyors checking the cane, which comes in various shades of green, found stalks bent in water, brown and dead in the mouth of the Mississippi River. That’s when they began to notice significant die-offs of four varieties of cane and more open water in the hundreds of acres the cane once occupied. Two to three years before, there was a thick, unrelenting wall of marsh.
“They are feeding on it,” said J. Andrew Nyman, a professor at the School of Renewable Natural Resources at LSU. “The bugs suck the sap out. The leaves are trying to send sugar to the roots, and they suck out so much that the plant can’t function. It dies.” Nyman said he picked up a stalk one day, and the bugs covered it. In an online seminar about the invasion, Diaz displayed a graph that said six feet of cane can have nearly 200 insects almost invisible to the naked eye, and 700 in extreme cases. He described them as translucent, extremely small but highly mobile, and moving in dense populations.
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