|Working With Cerceris fumipennis||State Sites: Maine | New York|
Picture a German Shepherd sniffing for drugs at the airport… now replace the dog with the native wasp Cerceris fumipennis, the drugs with invasive wood-boring beetles, and the airport with a forest, woodlot or tree-lined city street. Sniffing out alien beetles with native wasps has proven to be an effective approach to biosurveillance, and an elegant reminder that native insects are sophisticated organisms often capable of outperforming our best technology. Most entomologists are familiar with the concept of biological control, by which pest species are brought under control using a parasitic or predaceous species. Biosurveillance is a similar strategy of turning an organism’s behaviour to our benefit, in this case using a crabronid wasp to monitor or survey for the introduced buprestid Agrilus planipennis (the Emerald Ash Borer or “EAB”).
Video courtesy of Dick Walton from Natural History Services