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Beetles Help Fight Invasive Weed

Posted on: Monday, 25 February 2008, 00:00 CST

For years, cattle farmers in northwest Iowa have struggled with a scourge that eats away at their grazeable land.

The problem is an invasive weed called leafy spurge. The non- native plant, with origins in Europe and Asia, pushes out prairie grass and offers a toxic alternative that cattle won't eat.

Enter the beetles.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the nonprofit Nature Conservancy released the Aphthona flea beetles in limited areas about 10 years ago and have found they're experts at gobbling up leafy spurge, a weed with milky, latex sap that causes lesions in cows that eat it.

It's a slow process, but the beetles are helping native grass that suits bovine palates regain a foothold. The effort has been proven effective in parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Montana as well.

"Leafy spurge is just such an aggressive weed," said Scott Moats, who works for the Nature Conservancy in northwest Iowa and Nebraska. "We still don't really know how it got here, to the U.S. But if you don't control it, it eats into your forage space like crazy."

Left alone, leafy spurge has no natural environmental check and can spread quickly. And even when the beetles were set loose in northwest Iowa, it took years to see much of a tangible result.

"It's a really aggressive invader," said David Kazner, a research entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Sidney, Mont.

It's actually baby beetles, in their larvae stage, that do the most damage to the plant.

Source: Telegraph - Herald (Dubuque)

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