Those dead insects matter

Marlene A. Condon
Condon is a naturalist, writer, photographer and speaker living in Crozet. She is the author and photographer of “The Nature-friendly Garden.”
Re: “Trapping the borer,” May 9 news story:
The purple boxes hanging throughout the state to detect the Emerald Ash Borer appear fairly innocuous, until you take a closer look.
A Roanoke Times reporter found a dozen Eastern tiger swallowtail butterflies — our official state insect — stuck to just one box in Botetourt County. In Virginia, 5,500 such (death) traps are being hung this year, effectively killing any insect that steps foot upon them.
Should people care about the unnecessary killing of nontarget insect species? Yes, because these insects all have important roles to play in the environment, and the numbers of insects are way down from what they were just a half-century ago.
This fact matters because our lives are possible only if we co-exist with unimaginably large numbers of insect species that provide services we require, such as pollination of plants to help perpetuate them and the necessary recycling of organic matter to enable optimal plant growth.
If this environmental cost doesn’t seem significant to you, then perhaps the colossal waste of your tax dollars will. Nine million dollars have been spent annually for these survey activities in each of the last several fiscal years, but what happens when a survey finds the borer is in a new area? A quarantine — a restriction of the movement of ash products capable of transporting this insect to nonquarantined localities — may be put into place to try to slow the spread of EAB.
However, enacting a quarantine after detection is too late — as has been empirically shown in Northern Virginia. EAB was found at multiple sites in Fairfax County in 2008, resulting in the establishment of a quarantine for 10 Northern Virginia counties and independent cities. Yet the quarantine had to be expanded in 2010 to two more counties and the city of Winchester due to additional EAB detections.
Instead of wasting tax dollars and the lives of numerous innocent insects, common sense dictates that quarantines and public education should be enacted before EAB has a chance to be transported from one locality to the next.
People should notify federal and state representatives, as well as Gov. Bob McDonnell, to stop funding EAB surveys.