EAB

[Treeaddict]

So once they exhaust their food source, are they expected to pass off the scene? Anyone have any theories? I thought the fungus that wiped out the American chestnut would have died off after it killed all the chestnuts but apparently it’s still hanging around.

 

[Burnham]

Makes sense that there must be a secondary host beyond the preferred species, at least with the chestnut blight.

 

[lxskllr]

That's my thinking, but it's completely uneducated. I've seen no reference to any second choice trees(there's actually a couple oddballs I think), but I have a hard time believing a critter would specialize so exclusively as to go extinct if that tree were gone. My suspicion is they make due with something else til the ashes come back, then reinfest.

 

[flushcut]

The ash in my county is virtually all gone, last figure I heard was %95 gone, but EAB is still here and getting the last 5%.

 

[Marc-Antoine]

One can think that a predator or a parasite could find interesting the EAB as a food source due to its massive expansion. Nature has probably a plan like that but it takes time to implement and may not be fast enough to save the trees, at least in their main location. Some may survive outside the preferred growth area, or not.
Look at the devastation in the landscape when the elms where targeted by the dutch elm disease. It was a good bunch of years ago, most of the big elms disappeared everywhere, but I still found frequently smaller ones in the wooded areas or in the edges. They can't make it very far and are killed after reaching a certain size, but they are still here. Time will tell.