Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[su do <speakingbeareturns@yahoo.com>]

I wonder if this was intentionally smuggled in? In
this day and age you never know.

Invasive insects intercepted at port

By KRISTEN MILLARES YOUNG
P-I REPORTER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/338113_beetle05.html


The containers pulled aside at the Port of Seattle
were supposed to be
full of only slate, granite, tiles and tractor parts.

But snuggled into the wood packing material inside
were fat larvae from
longhorned beetles, bark beetles and wood wasps. Those
alone could have
spread havoc akin to the hundreds of millions of
dollars in damage the
Asian longhorned beetle has wreaked in New York, New
Jersey and Illinois
since 1996.

Some may remember -- and mourn -- the 1,000-plus fruit
and hardwood trees
that had to be cut down in Tukwila in 2002, after a
nursery owner found a
tree-devouring citrus longhorned beetle on one of his
imported bonsais.

This time, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents
intercepted the
infested shipments from China and India.

The first batch of building materials from China
arrived at the Seattle
seaport Sept. 21. Ten days later, Customs agents
opened the two
containers, finding in one, two Chinese snails whose
species had never
been intercepted at a U.S. port before, and in the
other, beetle and wasp
larvae.

The snails are not of the same variety that has been
plaguing Tacoma's
Tideflats, but their presence -- along with bark
beetles and pinhole bark
borer weevils riddling the wood crates of an Oct. 22
shipment from India
-- shows how easy it is for invasive species to gain
entrance to the
United States. The container from India was sent back,
while the container
of snail-carrying granite, tiles and slate was
fumigated with methyl
bromide and allowed to proceed.

International trade, which buoys Washington's economy,
also pays the
travel expenses of such critters, whether they're
hopping aboard a
container or sneaking onto a ship.

"We're finding more and more pests from the countries
we're dealing with
more and more, and China is certainly one of them,
especially here in the
Northwest," said Eric Johnson, the Customs
agricultural chief who enforces
the federal agriculture restrictions locally. "We're
going to look at a
larger portion of Chinese merchandise than other ports
do, and we have for
the last couple of years, and we are finding our share
of quarantined
pests."

China was the Seattle port's largest trading partner
in 2006, when its
exporters sent nearly $13 billion worth of goods
through. India was
Seattle's 13th-largest trading partner, with $236
million worth of goods
flowing into the U.S. through Elliott Bay last year.

"Obviously, we can't look at every container that
comes into the country;
that is why we are selective of what we choose to look
at," Johnson said.
"We're going to target certain commodities from
certain countries because
of the history of past problems."

The Asian longhorned beetle, which attacks and kills
healthy trees, is
native to China and thus has few natural enemies in
the U.S. It also
prefers trees favored by urban gardeners, such as
maples, horse chestnuts,
willows and elms. It also will attack commercial fruit
trees such as pear
and plum.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that the
Asian longhorned
beetle and other Chinese woodboring insects could
cause as much as $138
billion in damage to the U.S. economy. There are no
Environmental
Protection Agency-approved pesticides effective at
controlling the pest.


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