It's not all about invasive plants...

It's sometimes about invasive bugs that eat the native plants. Long, but worthwhile article:

Weevil Eating Florida's Air Plants Perplexing Researchers

POSTED: 2:17 pm EST February 11, 2006

GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- Behind door No. 2108 of the University of
Florida's Department of Entomology is the world headquarters for
control of an obscure Central American weevil with a black body and
orange stripe.

The weevil eats air plants, a type of bromeliad, some variety of
which lives in practically every tree in Florida. When the weevil
passes through, whole treetop ecosystems crash to the ground.

In 1989, the weevil was first discovered by Broward County nursery
owners in a batch of imported air plants.

"They sprayed the heck out of it, but it was too late. It had
already spread," said University of Florida entomologist J. Howard
Frank, who's been gunning for the weevil ever since.

Last year the "evil weevil," as Frank and others call it, was
sighted in Merritt Island -- the most recent stop on its slow
northward trek.

In the entomology labs, in local plant nurseries, in the cloud
forests of Honduras, and in state-of-the-art quarantine facilities,
its human enemies are trying to stop it. But they haven't had an
easy time.

Citrus-chewing moths and golf course-nibbling mole crickets get the
high-profile funding, for instance, while evil weevil fighters must
largely rely on fundraising drives by bromeliad societies around the
state.

But the cost could be high if the weevil isn't stopped. Already it
has sliced and diced its way through some of the state's biggest,
most pristine and breathtaking forests, like the Fakahatchee Strand,
part of the Everglades of Southwest Florida, and the Okaloacoochee
Slough, north of the Everglades area.

What most people call air plants are members of the genus
Tillandsia, named by Carl Linnaeus after his Finnish friend
Tillands, who was so averse to water that he once walked 200 miles
to avoid getting on a boat.

Air plants don't actually live on air, but on light, humidity and
decay; bugs and small animals die in them, moisture collects in
them, and their leaves absorb the brew. They're found only in the
warmer regions of the Americas.

Among the Tillandsias are Spanish moss and what are sometimes
nicknamed "wild pines," explosive green tufts that live high in
trees and produce long, bright, blooming stalks of pink and yellow.

Small Tillandsias get glued to magnets as Florida souvenirs, and in
the wild, a vast canopy of air plants supports all kinds of life --
frogs, bugs, birds, even snakes. They're part of what makes Florida
look like Florida.

"Without them we'd be North Carolina," Frank said.

New Smyrna Beach native John Russell turned a high school science
project on air plants into a 35-year career growing them. In their
45,000-square-foot nursery in Sanford, Russell and his wife, Jimye
Kaye, care for hundreds of thousands of Tillandsias, which offer
their erratic leaves and geometric blooms in every direction.

In one corner of Russell's vast space are mats full of tiny
seedlings, each the size of a pinky nail, painstakingly grown from
the seeds of endangered air plants. Each group is labeled with the
exact spot it was collected.

Russell is raising them as a safety measure, in case the plants go
extinct. Of the 16 species that live in Florida, 10 are now listed
by the state as threatened or endangered. Some are listed because
they're just plain rare. Two were among Florida's most common plants
until the weevil showed up.

The world contains a lot of weevils; scientists guess there are
60,000 species. Weevils are known by their curved noses -- which
aren't really noses because weevils don't smell with them; they bite
with them. Minus the nose, a weevil is essentially a beetle.

Before the evil weevil showed up in 1989, there existed a native
Florida weevil whose larvae eat air plants -- but it's a picky eater
and eats small plants. The evil weevil has a much broader appetite,
and goes for big plants.

The weevil lays eggs in the air plant's core. Its larvae chew it to
a brown mushy pulp, until the plant simply disintegrates and its
leaves fall off. (The evil weevil ignores Spanish moss, because it
has no center.)

Something in the weevil's native Central America keeps it from
destroying all the air plants; but in Florida, all bets are off.

The concept of "biological control" means stopping a harmful species
with a helpful one, and it's known in nonscientific circles mainly
for backfiring -- some creature is introduced to eat an animal or
plant, then becomes an even bigger menace.

Australians are still living with the monster toads brought in to
control a sugarcane pest; Jamaicans have to deal with mongooses from
India, which seemed, in the 1870s, like a swell way to kill snakes.

In recent decades, biological control has become more precise and
successful.

"We have to provide extensive data to show that the natural enemy
will be of no harm to the environment, or domestic animals, humans,
or plants," said Ronald Cave, an entomologist working with Frank on
the weevil project. "It's expensive and it takes a while to do. But
the results can be very nice and ecologically safe."

Frank and his colleagues recently declared victory over the mole
cricket, a turf-eating pest that's long been the bane of cattle
ranchers and golf course owners.

"We've got a fly, a wasp and a nematode all going to town on mole
crickets," Frank said.

To control an invader like the evil weevil using pesticides, Frank
said, "you'd have to call out the Air Force; it would cause untold
environmental damage, and you'd need about $500 million."

After the weevil was first spotted, Frank launched a search for it
all over South Florida, where it was quickly making hash of the
treetops. Dying, fallen air plants littered the ground in Broward
County, and the weevils were spreading. An army of bromeliad-lovers
was mobilized to help chart the weevil's course.

In 1992, Frank and a colleague got federal funds to collect the
weevil in southern Mexico, and to seek out a natural predator that
might be used in Florida to kill it. They got the bug, but no
predator.

Two years later Frank called Cave, who was working in Honduras. He
asked Cave if he knew of anything that ate the weevil. Cave did not.
Cave searched the cloud forests for rotten air plants, hoping to
find some more weevil larvae -- and maybe, with a close enough look,
some gnarly weevil-eating parasite hanging around.

He brought the plants back to his lab, letting the larvae eat away.
But in a few weeks, just as the weevil larvae were supposed to start
turning into weevils, something popped out of their skins.

It was maggots of another insect, and they'd conveniently eaten the
weevil larvae's insides. The weevil larvae died.

Cave had his parasite, and it was nice and nasty. When the maggots
grew up, they turned out to be a fly of a species unknown to
science. (Frank and Cave have since given the fly a name, but won't
say what it is until it's officially published in March.)

If the scientists could just cultivate the fly, and test it, and
introduce it in Florida, they might stop the spread of the weevil.
In a process that took five years, Frank and his colleagues secured
permits and funds, and set the flies up in a special quarantine
building in Gainesville with triple doors. The flies had, Frank
thought, everything a fly could want.

Then suddenly, he said, "they died like flies." Frank blamed an air-
duct problem for the die-off. And the weevil crusade was back to
square one. That was seven years ago.

The entomologists still thought the fly was the best weapon in their
arsenal, even if it meant starting over. So they got more permits
and more of the still-nameless Honduran flies. Cave is rearing the
Honduran flies in a special facility in Fort Pierce, and so far, no
system breakdowns have been reported.

The flies appear to be harmless to everything but weevils, and the
scientists will apply this year for a permit to release them. But
the flies, unfortunately, are high-maintenance.

"They are difficult to rear," Cave said. "They take a lot of manual
labor and special conditions. Ideally I'd like to release thousands,
but we'll be lucky to release 50 or 100."

Time and financial constraints prevent raising any more, he said. It
will be a tall order for 100 flies to kill the hundreds of thousands
of evil weevils chomping their way through Florida's treetops.

But it's a start. After all, it was only a handful of weevils that
started this mess in the first place. If the flies disappoint, the
scientists will look for something else.

"We've got to succeed," Frank said.



Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This
material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Maybe this explains some of the dead airplants we see in Fakahatchee. Next time we go down I'll take a closer look at the plants. Scary stuff, for sure

I pray that the gypsy moth never makes it to the south!

Good point about bugs
here is another example...

http://www.uvm.edu/albeetle/

Bye bye pitch pine (Pinus rigida)
This bug has caused the destruction of most of the pines on western Fire Island.