What’s Killing Canada’s Pine Trees?

Deep in the woodlands of Western Canada, a war is being waged against an insect the size of a grain of rice that threatens to spread to pine forests stretching eastward to the Atlantic Ocean. Since the late 1990s the mountain pine beetle, or Dendroctonus ponderosae, has attacked and killed hundreds of millions of commercially valuable pine trees in British Columbia, Alberta, and parts of the western U.S. The insects attack the trees by boring beneath the bark, where they feed and spread a blue-stain fungus, which becomes a food source for their larvae and inhibits the trees from increasing resin output to fend off the beetles. While warmer winters, a result of climate change, have allowed beetle populations to explode in some areas, the government of Alberta isn’t giving up the fight to contain the damage. But in British Columbia, where the infestation has dramatically depleted mature timber supplies, large Canadian companies have been looking south of the border and aggressively acquiring U.S. lumber operations to meet demand.