Not all pine trees are created equal when it comes to fending off their mortal enemy, the mountain pine beetle.
Not all pine trees are created equal when it comes to fending off their mortal enemy, the mountain pine beetle.
A new University of Alberta study shows that lodgepole pine trees with larger resin ducts survived beetle attacks that killed trees with smaller ducts. Located in the needles, branches, trunk and roots, the ducts act like highways to carry sticky, toxic resin to whatever part of the tree is being attacked.
The discovery, published in Frontiers in Plant Science, sheds new light on why some trees survive mountain pine beetle attacks while others don’t, said lead author Shiyang Zhao, a research assistant in the Faculty of Agricultural, Life & Environmental Sciences.
The wood-boring insect has killed millions of hectares of pine forest in British Columbia since its population exploded in the late 1990s and spread to Alberta in 2006.
Continue reading at University of Alberta.
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