?Would y'all be interested in a forestry bug, disease or disorder of the day?

[Don P]

This one has a couple of chapters, there are borers, fungus, ants, no termites. If it quits pouring I'll get a fruiting body and a couple more pics at daylight to help id and flesh this out. It might help if I say the borer has yellow racing stripes  . It is dumping... wish I had gotten all that firewood under cover  :-\

[Don P]

Well that was timely, got the gutters clean, dogs abluted, skid steer put up, fire in da shop and a picture or two and it just started dumping again.

Yesterday was what it looks like at the splitter, this is what I'm looking for in the woods;


 

[Ljohnsaw]

Is that Turkey Tail?

[Don P]

I had to look that up, Trametes, or, Polyporus versicolor. I'm pretty sure I know that one, this is much more uniform, bland colored. It is a polypore, the cracks on the top are I guess the most distinguishing feature (I didn't know that, i just have the google  :D)

[Don P]

I posed the question as it came to me, but, that is kind of from the back end, we were seeing the accumulation of damage from several things, which, is often the case.

It probably makes more sense to describe the train wreck in the order it happens.

The tree is a Black Locust. If it were not for this problem it would occupy the place of Teak in North America.

Late summer you'll see this guy flying around, the Locust Borer, Megacyllene Robinia (everything black locust related has robinia in it somewhere}.
Insects: Locust Borer, 4-H Forestry - YouTube
Locust Borer (vt.edu)

It is a longhorned beetle, remember from previously, longhorns have round headed larvae. This particular one has red faced round headed larvae with a huge appetite and granular frass.

The borers have made entry wounds.. I think the video was showing pecker damage on larvae holes, I've seen our big pileated woodpeckers working them over, but at any rate, the borers breach the bark. They can be confused with a painted hickory borer.

If you read that above I think it said the borers prefer stressed trees. That is for a pest id next summer, the locust leaf miner. By the time the locust borer beetles emerge, the trees here are pretty much brown from leaf miners. I've noticed on sweeter soils locust does better. By midsummer when the borer larvae mature and emerge as the longhorned beetle, the leaf miners have shut down the tree's energy factory.

The spores of Phellinus Robiniae, aka Fomes rimosus, aka cracked cap polypore. I just know it as locust heart rot and those are conchs on the stem, releasing spores. The spores get into the borers tunnels and introduce heart rot. This is one of THE most decay resistant species. Except for this particular fungus that actually eats locust alive. That is the doty wood in my firewood pics. By the time you see the conchs, the tree has at least one good place of heart rot. As I look at that picture above of several conchs up the stem, that thing may be a standing culvert.

A Study of the White Heart-Rot of Locust, Caused by Trametes robiniophila (jstor.org)

It is one of the white rots, also known as the soft rots. I think of these as full moisture rots often in a living tree as opposed to the brown rots that are more wet/dry cycle rots in dead wood.

In the left hand firewood chunk above you can sort of see and imagine the root tips of the fungus taking advantage of the main vertical highways of the tree but you can see where they also use the rays to travel and spread, the right side of the dark brown rot has a couple of what look to me to be rays spreading the rot. I've noticed that before and the paper talks about it a bit.

So there it is, not really one thing but a series of one thing after another. I can think of another example like this just outside my door. But its someone else's turn!  :D

[Don P]

Whew, that paper was dense, and a century old, it took 3 runs at it but there was a lot there. As a carpenter this caught my eye.

"Advance rot" has in recent years been given considerable attention, and during the world war the price paid in human lives as a result of weak spots in aeroplane timber instigated special research along this line by the national government. Unfortunately the results of these studies are not yet available in the literature. Boyce (I920, p. i5) found in the dry rot of incense cedar, where the decayed areas alternate with apparently sound wood, that " hyphae were commonly present in the apparently sound wood surrounding young pockets to a distance of 4 mm., and sparingly to 8 mm. in a horizontal direction," while he found scattered mycelium vertically beyond the last decay pocket to a distance of 7.8 cm. Meinecke (I9I4) found the advance rot of Echinodontium tinctorum on Abies concolor to extend vertically from 2 to 6 feet beyond the typical rot. Weir and Hubert (I9I8), working with the same fungus on Tsuga heterophylic, report advance rot recognizable at from I to 5 feet. In these cases a trained observer can usually recognize the advance made by the fungus by slight irregularities in color by streaks. Munch (I9IO) working with a sap-rot, Stereum purpureum on poplar, perceived that the advancing hyphae pre- ceded the zone of browning to some extent.

Hartig (1894), speaking of cut timber, suggested long ago that mycelium might be expected in the apparently sound regions of such wood. In the lilac, Von Schrenk (I9I4) emphasizes the sharpness of the line between "sound" and completely destroyed wood, and all observers know that this is a frequent condition on gross examination. Fomes igniarius on poplar, occurring along tamarack swamps in Michigan, shows this contrast most markedly. In other heart-rots like that produced by Polyporus hispidus and Fomes fraxinophilus on ash, dried-out logs often show a rather in- distinct demarcation. But although no generalization can be attempted from the one case studied by us, it would seem that others of the heart-rots found in the hardwoods might be expected to show advance rot, and perhaps to an unsuspected linear extent. The economic importance of this point grows in proportion to the scarcity of sound trees, and the temptation to inspectors of timber to pass slightly decayed stuff is only too well known by our lumber-using manufacturers. If the weakening of the apparently sound wood surrounding a narrow core of rot in a large log of valuable timber were only half what our test figures show, it might still be of serious significance when used for certain structures.

[doc henderson]

Watched a documentary on the history channel about the beginning of the industry, Boeing, McDonald Douglass and ford.  As they moved to metal frames for higher load, speed and engines, a German plane crashed as he continued to use wooden wing parts, and the wing broke and fell off the plane.

[caveman]

Don P, thank you for sharing the rot report.  

I took a few pictures today at school of a tree that has a few disorders.

What do you see?  What kind of tree?



 

 

 

 

[Ljohnsaw]

Some sort of scale bug on Loblolly pine?  Needle don't look long enough for Long Leaf Pine.

[Don P]

It's hard to judge but I think you're on the right track, pine needle scale on longleaf pine?

[Ljohnsaw]

Do they eventually go away on their own or is that tree doomed?  I figure you could douse the tree with a soapy solution to wipe them out.

[caveman]

Y'all are right on the scale.  The black stuff on the needles is something else.  It is not a loblolloy.  Loblollys have needles in fasicles of three.  These are twos and threes.  It is a southern yellow pine.  
I.D. the tree and I.d. the black stuff on the needles.  

The black stuff is fungus that feeds on aphid urine (honey dew).  

[Don P]

With that hint and some googling I'm coming up with pine aphids and sooty mold growing on their honeydew.

[caveman]

The tree is a slash pine, one of the four southern yellow pines.  The black stuff is sooty mold.  There seems to be at least one type of scale insect and maybe more.  I did not see aphids, but the sooty mold suggests that they have been there, or they still are.

Just a little on slash pine.  About half of the pine that John and I saw is slash pine.  It was, along with longleaf, used for naval stores production.  The needles are in fascicles of two and three.  The needles tend to grow down the branches a bit more than longleaf, the fascicles are a little shorter than longleaf.  

[caveman]

Today's disorder is not really forestry related, but it is unique enough to be interesting.  This insect has evolved to be able to eat from this poisonous woody ornamental landscape plant that it is pictured on.  This was taken yesterday evening outside of my shop while I was mixing up a bucket of stucco.  The leaves have mostly been eaten, except for the midrib portion, which has the highest concentration of toxin.  All parts of this plant are poisonous.  I have read that nine leaves have enough poison to kill a cow if eaten.  

What is this caterpillar?   

 

[Poquo]

Monarch butterfly caterpillar? I seem to remember that from school decades ago.

[caveman]

No, these caterpillars turn into polka-dot wasp moths.  

[Ljohnsaw]

Cool looking wasp!
common name: oleander caterpillar
scientific name: Syntomeida epilais Walker (Insecta: Lepidoptera: Erebidae: Arctiinae)

[caveman]

That is the one.
https://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/orn/oleander_caterpillar.htm#:~:text=The%20oleander%20caterpillar%2C%20Syntomeida%20epilais,caterpillar%20can%20cause%20considerable%20defoliation.    

[Don P]

It's not oleander leaf or caterpillar.  Ironically, last night when we went in for supper, I noticed I had a small oleander caterpillar crawling on my left wrist.  My almost 4yo grandson was with me in the kitchen and I was explaining to him that the orange and black oleander caterpillar was adapted to be able to eat poisonous leaves of the oleander plant.  My grill was nearby an oleander bush.

From page 1, I peaked early  :D

[Don P]

One of my wife's friends needed a flat for a dozen half pint jelly jars and I had this really rough cant/squared up post  :D. This was a hybrid we planted. I sawmilled it up on the tablesaw just to see what the wood looked like. It was more interesting wood than expected. This little tree had a rough life.



 

Care to guess what it is and what got it?

[doc henderson]

I see some blue stain, and borer sign.  also looks like some physical damage like a limb broke or was sawn off the far end of the board.  Ash?  not sure what hybrid.

[Don P]

It's an evergreen and I'm stuffed up.
@Wlmedley posted this on another thread when I posted a picture of the box.

Nice looking box.Looks a little like hickory?

It's not hickory but that observation is spot on, he's seeing the same "tell".

A scan is going to be clearer than a pic, hang on I'll have to edit it in from the other computer





Whoops, the stick is upside down but the main damage I'm seeing is clearer. And its the same varmint as hickory. That said, there's several things to talk about here.

[tule peak timber]

Frass is my friend.

[Don P]

The borers were secondary damage. Here's a better pic of the one still hanging on,