In other places on Guam, buckets are hung at one mile intervals along major roads to detect for new infestations. The vaned bucket traps are a common site around the hotels in Tumon Bay where the project is doing mass trapping to kill beetles in the infestation area. Traps are visited by project staff about every two weeks and all beetles caught are removed, counted. There is not enough space in the bucket for the large, heavy beetles to fly out. The lure attracts both male and female beetles that fly into the vanes and fall into the bucket. A commercially available rhino beetle lure is hung at the center of the vanes. Each trap consists of intersecting plastic vanes placed in a large plastic bucket. The eradication project has built and deployed more than 1700 pheromone traps. ![]() Red circles indicate traps which have caught one or more beetles. This Google Earth image shows locations for over 1700 rhino beetle traps deployed on Guam. Because adult beetles have been occasionally caught in traps well outside of the known infestation, the quarantine boundary has been expanded to cover a large area of Northern Guam. To prevent the spread of the rhino beetle to uninfested parts of Guam, the Department of Agriculture has imposed a regulation making it illegal to transport green waste and live plants across a quarantine boundary without inspection and/or treatment. The Guam Coconut Rhinoceros Eradication Project uses three tactics aimed at driving the rhino beetle population to extinction: quarantine, trapping and sanitation. Aubrey Moore, an entomologist at the University of Guam provides scientific and technical support and Roland Quitugua has been hired as the project’s operations chief. ![]() The eradication project is under joint leadership of Dallas Berringer, APHIS Port Director for Guam, and Paul Bassler, Director of the Guam Department of Agriculture. Department of Agriculture: the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) and the Forest Service. They feed in decaying vegetation.Īn eradication plan was quickly developed and funded by two branches of the U.S. Image courtesy of Aubrey Moore, University of Guam Eradication means killing every single rhino beetle on Guam. Hollingsworth, the invasive species alarm was sounded and the infestation covered a small area, making eradication feasible. Often, an invasive species infest most of Guam before they are detected, making eradication impossible or too expensive. Signs of rhino beetle infestation was found only in a small area along the beach at Tumon Bay, extending around the point to the north to Fai Fai Beach. For the next week, the survey team combed the island to determine the extent of the infestation. Just a short walk down the beach from the wedding chapel, a coconut palm with signs of rhino beetle damage had a rotting coconut log under it which contained about 40 large grubs: a sure sign that the rhino beetle had established a population on Guam. Hollingsworth took the beetle to the Guam Department of Agriculture and the next day, a team from the Department of Agriculture and the University of Guam began a survey to look for more beetles. James Hollingsworth at a Tumon Bay wedding chapel where he works. The first rhino beetle was found on Guam on September 11, 2007. On some Palauan islands, the coconut palm was exterminated. The rhino beetle killed half of the coconut palms in Palau within a few years after arriving there near the end of the Second World War. The coconut rhinoceros beetle is native to Asia including the Philippines, and has invaded several Pacific islands during the last century. Food for the grubs is very abundant on Guam in the form of dead coconut palms killed by typhoons. They develop in and feed mainly on dead, decaying coconut material. ![]() Immature beetles, called grubs, do not feed on live trees. Trees damaged in this way die within about a year because the central growing point dies and cannot replace the old fronds that fall off over time. Palms are killed when a beetle bores through the growing tip. When these leaves mature and open they show distinctive v-shaped cuts. In addition to leaving a large bore hole, the beetles damage developing new leaves. Adult beetles fly up into the crowns of palm trees just after dark where they bore into the center of the tree to feed on the sweet sap. It is the world’s most serious insect pest of coconut palms. The rhino beetle is a very large and powerful scarab beetle. This latest invasive species may kill more than half of Guam’s palm trees (including coconuts, betelnuts and ornamental palms) if nothing is done about it. Then it was the Asian cycad scale killing more than half of Guam’s native cycad plants, known locally as “fadang”. Aubrey Mooreįirst it was the brown tree snake which killed most of Guam’s native birds. Guam's Rhino hunters 11 subcommittees research to prepare for buildup By Dr.
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