news story / By Bob Doran

Invasion of the Auger!

“The USDA is currently investigating this case,” he said. “There’s an international treaty through the United Nations [the International Plant Protection Convention] that regulates wooden packing material because it has been a major source of transported pests. The way this should have worked, the wood used for the crates should have been treated in India and the crates should have born a stamp showing their origin and what treatment was applied. There was no such stamp. So it got through the international safety net.”

Who’s to blame for the renegade packing crate? The shift of responsibility from USDA to CPB may have played a part. It could be that the volume of shipping containers coming into West Coast ports is too vast for the number of inspectors.

California has its own quarantine program. Anyone who has driven back from Oregon has experienced it. Juliano’s day-to-day job responsibilities include inspections of any package containing plant material coming through the mail, FedEx or UPS. He admits it’s an imperfect system.

“The reality is, not everything will be looked at,” said Juliano. “In this case, the international laws in place to prevent transport of pests were violated. It got though and made it up here. Thankfully, HSU saw it and called us.”

Juliano emphasized that he is not really worried about the viability of any auger beetles that may have escaped. When he contacted agricultural authorities in Australia, where the non-native pests are a problem, he found that the trouble is typically confined to tropical regions.

“Everything I’ve heard says it’s just not something known to establish in a temperate region. It’s a tropical insect; it’s not set up to survive frost and cold weather. It could have been much worse. An Asian longhorned beetle would be an example of a wood-boring pest that could establish here and would be devastating. It outright kills trees.”

So in this case we seem to have dodged the bullet. The plan for monitoring the false powder post beetles is to continue checking the trap at the lab until winter, then put up another next spring, “just to make sure.”

In the meantime, if a suspect beetle shows up in the trap, more traps will be set up to try to see how far the beetle may have spread. Since this particular exotic insect is a rarity, there is no protocol beyond that — no plan for eradication.

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