The Georgia Tech campus recently lost three old friends. For generations, the longtime campus fixtures had offered soothing shade to bystanders while providing snacks for squirrels. Alas, an unwelcome incursion of burrowing beetles cost the lives of three of the campus’ trees, all predating World War II.
The first week in June, a Tech landscaping employee noticed something amiss at the south end of the Tech lawn, where the leaves of one of the towering water oaks were turning reddish brown, despite Autumn being months away. Warren Page, director of facilities operations and maintenance, realized the seriousness of an ailing tree.
“It was a significant event. We had to let everyone know what was going on right away,” Page recalls.
About 7,000 trees beautify Georgia Tech’s 400-acre campus; the Arbor Day Foundation has honored Georgia Tech as a Tree Campus USA University for its dedication to campus forestry management and environmental stewardship. So if the campus’s trees are under threat, there’s a lot to lose.
By June 26, an arborist from the International Society of Arboriculture identified an infestation of Asian ambrosia beetles as the cause of the water oak’s malady.
In the springtime, the female of the species bores into trees, depositing eggs and leaving fungus as a food supply for the larvae. When the hatched larvae grow to adulthood, they further cultivate the fungus, eventually sapping a tree’s life.
Tech’s facilities landscape manager Hyacinth Ide was particularly concerned upon learning the identity of the culprits.
“The Asian ambrosia beetle is a death sentence for most trees,” he says. “There is no known effective treatment at this time. Infested trees must be removed immediately to avoid infesting other trees.”
In addition to tree patient zero, the facilities department found infestations in a second water oak and a red oak and removed all three in late July.
“We removed the infested trees quickly, sprayed the remaining trees with Bifenthrin to protect them, and no other trees have been infected,” Page says. “We think it is unlikely we’d have this problem next year, but we do plan to treat the remaining trees again next year to make sure.”
Page estimates that the trees stretched about 60 feet high each, and while they’ll be replaced with multiple 15-foot saplings, their absence is conspicuous.
“The removal of these trees is a great loss to our tree canopy,” Ide says. “The removed trees will be replaced with shade trees equal to the total caliper removed. Even though the tree count will increase, it will take many years to reach the size of the removed canopy.”
Ide estimates that the water oaks were about 80 years old and the red oak as old as 100. Given that red oaks can live up to 500 years, we should salute these bastions of Georgia Tech, cut down in their prime.
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