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Nearly all of northwest Ohio’s ash trees may be wiped out to spare other parts of North America from the deadly emerald ash borer, one of the state’s key players in the eradication program said yesterday.

“The ash trees in northwest Ohio are doomed. There’s no question they’re going to die. If it’s not from the emerald ash borer [directly], they will have to be taken down [to help keep the pest from spreading],” predicted Dan Herms, an entomologist at Ohio State University’s Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster, Ohio.

New infestation maps posted on the Internet by the Ohio Department of Agriculture leave little doubt that Lucas, Wood and Fulton counties are the state’s most heavily impacted.

But, without delineating boundaries, Mr. Herms said this general quadrant of the state is at risk for a massive loss of trees.

“If it can’t be stopped here,” he said, “it will result in dead trees here and elsewhere.”

An ash tree is infested with the emerald ash borer in downtown Toledo in the spring. It has since been cut down.
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Mr. Herms is Ohio’s representative on an international science advisory panel behind the controversial protocol of cutting down all healthy ash trees within a half-mile radius of infested trees.

The eradication strategy — based on the hope of cutting off the flying beetle from its only known food source — has been adopted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and state agencies.

No chemical treatments have been proven effective at killing off the pest, which was first identified in southeastern Michigan in 2002. Mr. Herms said that as many as 10,000 adult emerald ash borers emerge from each infested tree in the spring, but they all try to find new host trees within a quarter of a mile.

He made his comments yesterday to 50 University of Toledo faculty members and graduate students during a visiting speaker seminar arranged by Elliot Tramer, the university’s first ecology professor.

The two were professionally at odds in April when The Blade published a letter that Mr. Tramer had submitted to the newspaper, questioning whether it was wise to stick with the current eradication protocol. In a recent interview and during the forum yesterday, Mr. Tramer asked if money would be better spent conceding the Toledo-Oregon area and widening the gap of trees where farmland is prevalent about 20 miles south of the metropolitan area.

Doing that would be cost-prohibitive, because the state would be forced to compensate landowners for taking down healthy trees far removed from infested trees, Mr. Herms said.

Mr. Herms reaffirmed his support for the existing protocol, saying that it appears to have worked in eradicating the beetle from Hicksville, Ohio, and Columbus. The strategy also appears to have been successful in keeping an outbreak from occurring in Maryland and Virginia, where a Michigan nursery had illegally shipped some 125 contaminated trees.

Although millions have been allocated to Michigan and Ohio, cutting has been stalled because the enormity of the task has resulted in cash flow problems, Mr. Herms said.

Contact Tom Henry at:thenry@theblade.com or 419-724-6079.

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