A small insect is causing big problems for Canada’s forestry industry.
The mountain pine beetle (MPB) is about the size of a grain of rice and it’s common to find more than 100 of them on a mass-attacked tree. Foresters first noted the beetle’s devastating impact on British Columbia’s lodgepole pine forests in the 1990s. A series of warm winters fueled the outbreak, and the MPB soon spread east into Alberta, where it began to attack other species, including the jack pine, which is prevalent throughout the boreal forest that stretches all the way to the Atlantic.