
Scientists say sudden oak death epidemic is no longer stoppable - whyenot
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/05/02/this-disease-has-killed-a-million-trees-in-california-and-scientists-say-its-basically-unstoppable/
======
whyenot
Five hundred years ago, Spaniards spread the seeds of european annual grasses
as they traveled between missions in California. Within a century or two, a
large part of the California landscape had changed. Annual grasses crowded out
native perennial grasses, and we got our "golden hills." Nobody knows exactly
what California looked like before the Spanish arrived or how many species may
have gone extinct, but you can still see echoes of what happened. For example
Mount Hamilton Jewelflower, now reduced to a few relict populations on
serpentine soil where the annual grasses don't grow so high...

SOD is a disturbance of similar magnitude. It won't kill all the oaks. For
example it only kills black oaks (coastal live oak, interior live oak,
California black oak, ...) but not white oaks (blue oak, valley oak, ...).
What it likely will do is over time dramatically change the makeup of the oak
woodlands, especially along the coast and in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

~~~
stevecalifornia
Not plant related, but equally fascinating: There used to be a lake bigger
than Lake Tahoe in California between Fresno and Bakersfield. It It was the
largest fresh water lake west of the Great Lakes (by surface area). It was
drained for agriculture.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulare_Lake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulare_Lake)

~~~
kingmanaz
For a good read on what happened to Lake Tulare, read "The King of
California". The world's largest cotton plantation now sits in the lakebed and
holds primary water rights. Pink sheet stock. Ticker BWEL.

~~~
ParadigmBlender
I went to the library and browsed the book on your recommendation. It is
indeed great. It includes a few photos and maps as well. I will have to find
the time to read it.

------
Declanomous
This makes me wonder what role fire normally plays in the life-cycle of tree
pathogens. Does this fungus survive heat well? Can it survive in the soil long
enough to spread to a new host (presumably a new Oak tree)?

As a second point, this demonstrates the danger presented by monoculture. The
industrialization of agriculture horticulture has been unquestionably
beneficial for us as a species. However, we do an absolutely terrible job of
managing existential risks in horticulture. When we grow crops, we grow
millions of acres of the same crop. When we plant trees, we plant thousands of
the same trees. City streets in the US used to be lined with Ash trees, as
they were inexpensive and fast growing. Now there are areas where almost every
tree has been cut down because of the Emerald Ash Borer.

I think the blame can be assigned as much to the consumer as it can with the
individuals growing the plants. Consumers, (myself included) are extremely
picky about what they will eat or buy. Varieties of crops are selected for
their looks, and varieties of crops that are not consistently good looking
fall by the wayside.

I don't think this will cause a famine in the first world in the near future,
but the poor genetic diversity of our horticulture is definitely an area of
concern.

~~~
ajkjk
The interaction between forest fires and tree pathogens is an area of active
research - a friend of mine is studying exactly that in her ecology PhD
program.
[http://ucanr.edu/sites/rizzolab/Research_Projects/Big_Sur_Ec...](http://ucanr.edu/sites/rizzolab/Research_Projects/Big_Sur_Ecoregion/)

~~~
Declanomous
That is really cool, thanks! I've spend a lot of time conducting research and
restoring Oak Savannas in the Upper Midwest, and I'd hate to see anything
happen to few remaining areas we have left. The Oak Savanna exists because of
fire, rather than in spite of it, and it would be really interesting to see if
fire did more for oak trees beyond burning competing species.

In the course of writing this comment, I checked the Wikipedia page for Oak
Savannas to see if it had any interesting insights. I didn't realize that
California oaks formed oak savannas as well. Hopefully that means that
research in the Midwest and Californian savannas can be shared and used to
draw insights into one another.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_savanna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_savanna)

------
justratsinacoat
>while there may once have been a chance to stop the spread of $ARTICLE_TOPIC
— around the year $CURRENT_DATE_MINUS_FIFTEEN_YEARS — that opportunity has
since passed. Forces didn’t mobilize fast enough or spend enough money

FTA, with minor edits; I think we'll see a lot more language like this in the
coming ten years. The consequence, which absolutely no one would be against
("what do you mean, there's 90% fewer oak trees?!"), always seems to logically
follow the general disinterest in preventing the problem ("what do you mean,
the _forestry service_ needs a 800% budget increase?!"). OTOH, it's generally
clear what we should have done, in hindsight, but there's all kinds of stuff
like this running around. The ever-eastward spread of the Asian long-horned
beetle; what ocean acidification is going to do to corals and anything else
that uses calcium carbonate to build its shell; etc

~~~
ascotan
It looks like in 2002 California enacted a task force to control the spread of
the disease. see "Sudden Oak Death Management Act of 2002". However, this was
subject to appropriations in the California state budget. The author is
implying the act was hampered by not having the budget to do the work
(apparently $60 million a year according the article).

~~~
justratsinacoat
>The author is implying the act was hampered by not having the budget to do
the work (apparently $60 million a year according the article)

There's always someone desperately trying to get The Powers That Be to notice.

------
shostack
I wonder if they'll find any hope with those trees left unscathed that are
deemed "resistant."

Also, with something like this, how do they remove the trees without the
disease spreading in the process? I know when I go to prune bits of my roses
that have black spot or rust, it can spread just by contact in the course of
removal which can be damn near impossible to avoid. I can only imagine how
that scales at tree size.

~~~
mathattack
I was thinking the same - eventually resistance develops.

~~~
MikeHolman
Maybe, but we've seen some plant diseases pretty much eradicate the original
species without them developing resistance. For example, the Panama disease
(despite the massive resources of the banana industry) devastated the Gros
Michel, and is now killing off the Cavendish.

Another example is phylloxera, which plagued Vitis vinifera (European grape)
vines in the 1800s. And to this day, the only solution is to hybridize or
graft them with American rootstock.

~~~
shaftway
But that's because there is zero genetic diversity in the Gros Michel and
Cavendish plants. None. They're all clones. You need some form of diversity to
develop resistance.

------
gloriousduke
Hawaii island is dealing with a fungal pathogen that impacts the most abundant
native tree similarly:
[http://www2.ctahr.hawaii.edu/forestry/disease/ohia_wilt.html](http://www2.ctahr.hawaii.edu/forestry/disease/ohia_wilt.html).

~~~
wahsd
Don't worry, soon humans will have destroyed all habitats. We're working
really hard, but we can't get to it all at once.

------
ArtDev
On an unrelated note, the best comment reply ever:

"Why do you assume that the experts missed a plan that some random guy on the
Internet came up with in 30 seconds?"

~~~
mjevans
Different areas of specialization or...

"given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" \-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_Law)

------
jqm
The prevention to this type of problem is probably the same measure needed to
fix many forestry problems.

Regular fires.

But now we have homes right up to the forest and no one wants to look at
charred land for two decades. So I suppose it's still a no go. The thing about
fire though is eventually it probably happens anyway.

~~~
harlanlewis
For SOD, there's actually a fairly simple preventative step everyone could
take that is poorly publicized.

It wasn't until I happened to be out with someone who does environmental
impact studies for the army corp of engineers that I learned how easily SOD
can be transported from place to place through the soil that collects on
clothing. Most of us wash after a trip outside, but we should be bleaching our
shoes. The pathogen is quite hardy and can survive the seasons without a plant
host. Without a thorough wash, the next trip we take is likely to drop off a
few spores, risking its introduction to plants we touch and the watershed.

That said, this is just one of many preventative steps, and one that's
unlikely to be broadly adopted. We're likely too far down the road already for
a lot of impacted forests.

~~~
jamestnz
This sounds very familiar. In New Zealand we have a lot of trouble with
"didymo"[1], an invasive algae which thrives in cold freshwater environments,
clogging up rivers with lots of green slime. It is very easily spread by
humans doing recreational activities such as fishing and boating,
inadvertently carrying it from one place to the next.

As such we've had intensive public education campaigns here, instructing
people to carefully clean down things like boots and boat hulls with either
hot water or bleach solution[2]. Its spread continues, though perhaps less
quickly than without such a campaign.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didymosphenia_geminata](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didymosphenia_geminata)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didymosphenia_geminata#/media/...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didymosphenia_geminata#/media/File:Didymo_signage_on_Waiau_river.jpg)

------
djsumdog
> The disease is actually related to the pathogen that caused the Irish potato
> famine in the 1800s

I was in Ireland a few months ago. Someone I met in Galway said this famine
wasn't really a famine; that there were plenty of crops. The king simply
withheld the potato supply, forcing the famine.

~~~
tzs
That's partly correct and partly incorrect. It's incorrect in the claim that
the government withheld the potato supply. The potato crop massively failed
due to potato blight. The government had nothing to do with the potato
shortage. This was not just in Ireland, but also through Europe. It was more
significant in Ireland, though, because something like 40% of the population
depended on potatoes for most of their nutrition.

It is correct that there were plenty of crops, but these were grain crops, not
potatoes, which were raised largely for export. In earlier famines the
government had banned exports and made those non-potato crops go to feeding
the Irish. That was very unpopular with businesses. In the Great Famine the
government did not curb exports, and so even though Ireland was producing
enough non-potato food to feed those who had been depending almost solely on
potatoes, that food was exported instead. So in that sense, much of the blame
for _results_ of the potato crop failures can be laid at the hands of the
government.

Edit: there is an interesting song, written by Steven and Peter Jones, based
on letters their great-great-grandfather in Ireland sent to their great-
grandfather, who had immigrated to the United States. There are five verses,
covering the contents of five of the letters, between 1860 and 1892. Although
this is after the Great Famine, it provides an interesting look at what life
was like in Ireland for ordinary farmers as they went through hardship and had
family members leaving the country.

Here's a nice performance of it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRHQAtKbRTk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRHQAtKbRTk)

~~~
gohrt
Similar to how the English colonial tyrants killed millions of Indians by
exporting crops during a famine:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1876%E2%80%937...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1876%E2%80%9378)

~~~
undersuit
Same tyrants. By the time of the potato famine Ireland was unified with Great
Britain, "this was achieved through a considerable degree of bribery, with
funding provided by the British Secret Service Office, and the awarding of
peerages, places and honours to secure votes."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland#Union_with_Great_Brita...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland#Union_with_Great_Britain)

------
mdip
Years ago all of the oak trees in my area were cut down due to being killed by
the Emerald Ash Borer, a beetle. Fines were imposed for exporting fire wood
outside of the affected counties (a common thing to do in my state where
people take their chopped logs up to their cabins for bonfires) but it did
little to keep the bug from spreading further and further.

Many of these trees were in large forests, but it's most noticeable in my area
due to the sudden change in suburbia from large oak trees planted when the
homes were originally built (some a half-century or more ago) now having
unusual looking, small maple trees adorning the front of their property. It's
sad to see yet another pest attacking those same trees.

~~~
hinkley
Something like this happened at my college, and one of my friends was in the
forestry program.

He was so pissed because every time trees on campus got a disease, they'd cut
them down and replace them all with a single species. So in 50 years when
those trees got a disease, they had to cut them all down again.

So 50 years from now some maple disease will have your town cutting down all
the trees all over again :/

~~~
mdip
That's a good point and bound to happen. In our area, the township covered the
price of the removal of the tree provided you allowed them to take it when
they chose to (otherwise you'd have to pay for the removal of a dead tree or
get fined for not handling a dead tree on your property).

Since the various jurisdictions didn't pay for the replacement trees (but all
had ordinances requiring a tree every "x" feet where the property meets the
roadway), people were free to purchase any kind of tree they wished. The
problem is that Maples were the most inexpensive tree that could be purchased
at a reasonable size so nearly everyone planted a variety of Maple. So,... yup
... give it a few years.

------
nroach
Sadly, this isn't the only fungal pathogen attacking american oaks. Oak Wilt
is dealing similar damage across the south and central plains states:
[http://www.na.fs.fed.us/spfo/pubs/fidls/oakwilt/oakwilt.htm](http://www.na.fs.fed.us/spfo/pubs/fidls/oakwilt/oakwilt.htm)

------
nradov
Besides the fungal pathogen _Phytophthora ramorum_ that kills oak trees,
similar funguses are also killing other types of trees. Many avocado orchards
in California have been wiped out by _Phytophthora cinnamomi_.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytophthora](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytophthora)

------
adolgert
There's a great paper modeling risk of invasion by sudden oak death into
California. Computing for science, done right:
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/ES10-00192.1/full](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/ES10-00192.1/full)

------
thrownaway2424
On the coast we have sudden oak death. In the hills they have pine bark
beetles. Bad years for (some) trees.

------
emodendroket
It's disappointing to see serious reporting like this saddled with a clickbait
title like "This disease has killed a million trees in California, and
scientists say it’s basically unstoppable."

~~~
chc
After reading the article, that seems like a fair summary. What do you feel is
wrong with it?

~~~
Tossrock
Obscuring the subject to force a click. "This disease" instead of "Sudden oak
death". The idea is that person will read the scary part, want to find out
which particular disease it is, and click through. It's headline SEO 101.

~~~
chc
The odds aren't great that a given person knows what "sudden oak death" is, so
that doesn't seem to add much except an extra expectation on the reader. I'm
pretty sure this headline is not far from what it would been as a newspaper
headline 30 years ago. It would have just been "Disease" rather than "This
disease" since newspaper headlines favor brevity, but using common nouns in
headlines for things that aren't super well-known is a pretty established
practice (e.g. "Florida man" rather than "Robert Johnson").

I guess basically, it doesn't seem like the name of the disease is really the
point of the article.

~~~
Dylan16807
Yes. You either already know about the disease or you don't. The wording of
"disease" vs. "sudden oak death" doesn't change how much I want to click at
all.

It's not a situation where the title might obscure _which_ disease is causing
the problem. There's one problem.

And "sudden oak death" is sort of a fake name anyway.

------
jagger27
Is anyone aware of any pre-industrial epidemics of a similar scale?

~~~
acomjean
The American Chestnut. It was pretty much wiped out by a disease that infects
its cousin, the Chinese Chestnut, which has defenses against it.

"The American chestnut tree reigned over 200 million acres of eastern
woodlands from Maine to Florida, and from the Piedmont plateau in the
Carolinas west to the Ohio Valley, until succumbing to a lethal fungus
infestation, known as the chestnut blight, during the first half of the 20th
century. An estimated 4 billion American chestnuts, up to 1/4 of the hardwood
tree population, grew within this range."

[http://www.acf.org/range_close.php](http://www.acf.org/range_close.php)

They're trying to reintroduce blight resistant strains by cross breading with
Chinese trees.

[http://www.acf.org/r_r.php](http://www.acf.org/r_r.php)

~~~
spqr0a1
The american chestnut has been successfully genetically engineered with an
oxalate oxidase gene for blight resistance. testing and out-crossing with
wild-type chestnuts is ongoing. Wider availability should be possible in the
next few years.

[http://www.esf.edu/chestnut/](http://www.esf.edu/chestnut/)

------
TazeTSchnitzel
What can be done to deal with the death of trees, then? Mass planting of
resistant species?

~~~
Afforess
Nature abhors a monoculture. Forests with 'resistant' strains will end up
causing more problems if they are only a few types of trees.

Maybe we should do nothing, and let trees that are more capable of surviving
fill in the gaps left by the oaks.

~~~
bdamm
Where I live (Sierra foothills), the Oaks are enjoying the space opened up by
the Pine tree die-off thanks to bark beetle. People are paying thousands of
dollars to cut down towering pines.

I have five enormous oaks and four full-size pines on my 1 acre lot. That adds
up to a potential liability of $18,000 or more. Doing nothing does not sound
appealing.

------
intrasight
They could just as way say: "Scientists say the evolution of the natural
landscape is no longer stoppable"

~~~
Angostura
It's curious that so much 'evolution' is going on at the moment.

Interesting how the Great Barrier Reef and the oceans fisheries are currently
'evolving'

Rather remiscent of how the Western European population evolved in response to
the plague.

~~~
Consultant32452
That's the fun of natural selection, sometimes you get selected, sometimes you
don't.

~~~
Angostura
Natural selection only works as a driving force of evolution where there is
sufficient variety in a population for the reproductively fit individuals to
be selected.

Where environmental change is so rapid that none of the individuals are fit,
you don;t get evolution, you get extinction.

------
pfarnsworth
I'm sorry but isn't this just Darwinism in play here? You get natural
selection, and various species that are selected against become extinct.

But it's not like it's going to turn into some sort of desert, the area, after
forest fires, will be replaced by another species that is presumably resistant
to the fungus, and life moves on.

~~~
jokr004
I don't think anyone is trying to blame someone for this.. Absolutely this is
nature taking its course, but we happen to like oak trees so it might make
sense that we would try and protect them.

~~~
pfarnsworth
But it no longer makes sense, since the scientists have already said that it's
unstoppable. So dumping more money into trying to protect them seems like a
waste of money, no?

~~~
ArtDev
Giving up is a very poor plan. Dead trees make wildfires much much worse.
California wildfires are terrible as it is.

~~~
pfarnsworth
Forest fires are a natural part of the cycle. In fact, it's forest fire
"prevention" that causes even bigger forest fires than normal. If they simply
let fires burn, it would naturally cleanse the forests of brush and dead trees
and create much smaller forest fires.

~~~
hinkley
It's more that the specific type of forests that John Muir was so fond of were
the result of intensive agroforestry by the tribes of California. They used
fire as part of a fairly large toolbox, and you don't get that sort of forest
without it.

