Weyco dock worker may have thwarted Asian wasp invasion
Thursday, April 13, 2006 7:24 AM PDT
By Michael Andersen
Printable version
E-mail this articleIf the wasps of the Pacific Northwest could talk, they might be thanking a sharp-eyed Weyerhaeuser Co. dock worker for their lives right now.
That's because the worker -- the company wouldn't say who -- may have stymied an invasion of fierce East Asian paper wasps when he came across a dozen fertile females who'd stowed aboard a cargo ship that anchored in Longview in late winter.
It was the first time that the nearly inch-long wasps, predators with a nasty sting, have been spotted in North America, said Art Antonelli, an entomologist for Washington State University-Puyallup.
Following the rules for such a discovery, Weyerhaeuser delivered the mysterious bugs to Kelso's WSU Extension office in Kelso, where horticulture coordinator Dixie Edwards identified them as females and told the company to comb the ship for any more bodies, then destroy them.
"The possibility of their colonization was very real," Edwards said.
Edwards passed the bugs along to Antonelli, who was shocked to see such huge wasps but didn't know the species. Eric Lagasa of the Washington state Department of Agriculture finally tracked down the wasps' identity.
They live along the Asian coast from Japan to India, Antonelli said.
Antonelli said a team of WSU investigators will search the Longview area later this year to see if any managed to escape.
If the East Asian wasps were to colonize the Longview area, they'd likely come into conflict with other insects, such as the European paper wasp. That non-native species reached the West Coast in 1997 after being introduced to the Eastern states.
European wasps, which are half the size of their East Asian cousins, wouldn't last long in a fight, Antonelli said.
Non-native species can have unpredictable and sometimes devastating effects on local ecosystems, said Gary Fredricks, director of Kelso's extension.
"When they introduced rabbits in Australia, they thought it would keep the grass down," he said. "Who'd have known that it doesn't have a natural predator, and it'd take off?"
That was in 1788. By the 1990s, Australia's 300 million rabbits cost the country hundreds of millions of dollars a year in crop and environmental damage.
As global trade and travel has increased, so has the frequency of plant and animal stowaways on planes and cargo ships. West Nile Virus arrived in New York City in 1999, presumably due to human transit.
Fortunately, Fredricks said, such mishaps remain fairly rare -- this is the first time he knew of an alien species arriving at the Port of Longview -- and people are learning to report odd plants and animals to local colleges.
Even if it's too late to stop a colonization, Fredricks went on, the government can take environmentally safe measures to reduce damage from an invasive species.
"Are we going to eradicate it?" he asked. "Probably not. Are we going to control it? Probably."
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