All across the United States and Canada, tiny pine bark beetles are killing trees. From the northern pine bark beetle in Canada, the mountain pine bark beetle in Colorado, Montana, and Idaho to the southern pine bark beetle in the southeastern United States, this bug—only millimeters in length—is costing North America tens of millions of dollars each year.
But the beetles' hold on their habitat is not iron-clad—one, the southern pine bark beetle (Dendroctonus frontalis)—depends on the light touch of a mutualistic microbe, Entomocorticium sp. A, to feed its larvae. And as Jon Clardy of Harvard Medical School and Cameron Currie of the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered, for this species the old adage "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" rings true—perhaps leading to new tools to control these tree-killers and other pathogens that infect humans.
Collaboration ...
