Cool! This guy was featured on NPR several years ago with IIRC Scott Simon. Good find David.

Dan

Fascinating, but where's the practical application? Can I buy one of his tree stethoscopes and listen for beetles? If I buy his CD and blast it over my stereo will my beetles eat each other and leave my trees alone?

Seems to me that this is something that people would jump on.

That might be the problem that there isn't at this time a widespread practical application. Interesting stuff nonetheless. Certainly protecting large areas of forest doesn't seem reasonable but maybe something property owners might someday use.

Well, they have sonic devices that supposedly shoo off mice - I was talking to a friend the other day who swears by the things.

I don't know if they still sell them, but I have a couple of battery-powered "hissers" that I move around the garden to shoo off nighttime critters - it has a switch that automatically works with daylight/night time, and at night, every few minutes, it hisses - supposedly sounding like a mountain lion, which supposedly gives the deer/raccoons/fox/bunny rabbits the willies, and they move along. I haven't done a scientific study on the effectiveness, but last night, when I was out moving the irrigation, it sure made me jump.

I'd imagine that an application would be an attractant - get the beetles swarming to a trap. They do something similar already with artificial pheromones to mess with the breeding of coddling moths, color attraction for tsetse flies, etc.

This article reminds me of the 2002 extreme drought when the ipsis beetles were doing their number around here. I lost a dozen trees to the beetles. There were so many that you could sit by the tree and hear them, and when the trees died, there were thousands of beetle carcasses on the ground - like half an inch thick of the things. Like a plague of locusts or something.