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"It's going to be really tricky because they live most of their life cycle inside the trunk of the tree, and you know you don't notice it until there's a hole where it's emerged. By then the adult is off somewhere else laying an egg," points out Lee Herman, curator of beetles at the American Museum of Natural History. "Fortunately, they evidently don't go very far.” Still, he says, fighting the infestation is “not going to be easy, and people don't like to have their trees cut down."
The Asian longhorn beetle has no known natural enemies. Because it is an introduced species in the U.S., its native biological control agent remains unknown, and it is very resistant to pesticides. On the positive side, this beetle is not a very mobile species (adult beetles do not fly further than a mile, or 1.6 kilometers, from the tree in which they hatched), which should somewhat slow its spread. Hoping that this fact will give them some breathing room, scientists are hard at work on identification, control, and eradication programs.
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