The official age of “Herbie” - the American elm in Maine that was officially the tallest of its species in New England until it finally succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease - is 217, reports the Press-Herald. From the story:
The 110-foot tree survived 14 bouts of Dutch elm disease thanks to its caretaker, Frank Knight, who’s [...]

I’m not sure what to make of this opinion piece from the site Moultonboro Speaks about the need to fight invasive milfoil on a New Hampshire lake, spoken via computer-generated voices by computer-generated cartoon characters - except to say that no traditional media outlet would ever have thought of it.

(Spotted via http://www.protectyourwaters.net/)

Worcester, Mass., has chopped down roughly 25,000 trees in an attempt to contain the voracious Asian longhorned beetle, a process that has cost tens of millions of dollars. Another $41 million in emergency funds have been added by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, reports the Globe. There’s a 74-mile quarantine zone around Worcester, within which [...]

The above map was taken from this blog post, which sources it to U. Vermont and Sea Grant researchers. The caption says it all: There are 48 invasive species identified in lake Champlain, and at least another 136 - 136 of them!!! - in waterways that connect to the lake, the Great Lakes, St. Lawrence Seaway and Hudson River.

I don’t know what else to say except holy cow.

Zebra mussels - those tiny, voracious, nasty little bivalves that have wreaked havoc in Midwestern waterways for decades - are spreading in western Massachusetts, reports the Berkshire Eagle. The mussels were spotted in Laurel Lake in July, where, according to a new report from the Mass. Department of Conservation, they have been for at least two years and are “firmly established.” Further, says the report, the mussels have been detected in the Housatonic River, and “10 water bodies in the region are at a high risk for infestation.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, fearing that the emerald ash borer will be unstoppable, has started a volunteer National Ash Tree Seed Collection Initiative, for people to collect ash-tree seeds that can be stored at the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colo. From the Web site: “The U.S. Forest Service has agreed to x-ray the collected ash seed to determine sound seed for storage. If the ash tree populations are completely decimated by the ash borer, the stored seeds can be used as the genetic base for work to re-establish ash trees for future generations.”

The program doesn’t seem to have started in Northern New England yet, but it’s in New York state. Details are here.

Part of me thinks this is brilliant foresight, and part of me is depressed as hell that it’s even necessary.

A UMass-Amherst post-doc is testing a predatory beetle called Laricobius nigrinus (I can’t find a common name) to see if it can stem the spread of hemlock wooly adelgid beetles, a voracious invasive that has snuck into New England. Here’s the school’s press release from earlier this month, which generated a short AP story yesterday [...]

The Worcester Telegram, which has been a consistently good source of information about the outbreakof Asian longhorn beetle in that city, has a story about the use of phermone traps to help find beetles, both to determine how far they’ve spread and to confirm that an eradication has been successful. It’s a good piece, but [...]

We all know that invasive species damage the environment, but it seems they can also damage historical artifacts! That’s the gist of this article from the Press-Republican about a wrecked Revolutionary War gunboat (built by Benedict Arnold in his pre-traitor phase, no less) lying on the bottom of Lake Champlain. The shipwreck is too deep to be reach by invasive zebra mussels, but not deep enough to be safe from quagga mussels, which some folks fear are on the march (or the aquatic version thereof) toward New England’s biggest lake. If they colonize the old wooden ship, they’ll destroy it.

I don’t know what things are like where you live, but where I live, purple loosestrife seems to be retreating.

The seasonal creek/wetland that runs through my property used to be choked with with this pretty invasive, but over the last three years they have virtually disappeared. They’re also gone from my little pond, where they were doing the astonishing task of out-competing cattails. They’re gone from the bigger pond across the street, and wet areas that I drive past daily seem far less lavender-colored than they used to be.

The Sunday Burlington Press-Herald has a great story about an eco-geek studying whether invasive Eurasian milfoil pulled out of Lake Champlain can be burned in a biomass power project, along with agricultural waste.
Blue Spruce Farm already generates grid-bound electricity in a generator fired with manure-fermented methane. A $10,000 grant from Central Vermont Public Service will [...]

The previous post was a jokey item about invasive species in Massachusetts - I had hardly put it up before I found (via the Aquatic Hitchhikers newsfeed) a very bad item about invasive species in Massachusetts: Zebra mussels have been found in the Bay State for the first time. The Berkshire Eagle story says these tiny mussels, which were accidentally released around the Great Lakes and have spread from California to Lake Champlain, are in Laurel Lake in western Mass.

If you can’t beat ‘em, eat ‘em is the motto of a Vermont program (reported by the Burlington Free Press) that teaches people how to make salads and other edibles from some invasive plants. The program focuses on garlic mustard, which is listed as an invasive in New Hampshire too and, to be honest, I can’t imagine this would work with most invasives. (Purple loosestrife goulash? Milfoil a la mode?) But I would sure love to eat that dagblasted swallowort, aka milkweed vine, that is choking my property.

(I’ll be on the road for a couple of days, visiting colleges with the family, so postings will be light.)
The cash-strapped state is seeking private help in buying one or two Diver-Assisted Suction Harvester units to vacuum up milfoil and other invasive aquatic species from the state’s lakes and ponds. (62 lakes and 10 rivers [...]

In New Zealand, where didymo, aka rock snot, is a major problem, they’re seeing an alarming trend: The slimy, stream-choking algae is expanding its environmental range, and starting to show up in warmer, still water instead of just cold, fast-moving water.Here’s a story from Down Under.

For our antipode cousins, that means it might spread to [...]