Mountain pine beetle
The mountain pine beetle is a tiny hard black beetle, about the size of a grain of rice. It lives almost its whole life hidden under the bark of pine trees. When millions of them attack at once, they can kill whole forests.
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Fun facts
It leaves the tree for just a few days in summer, when it flies off to find a new tree.
It brings a blue fungus into the tree. The fungus stops the tree from pushing the beetles out with its sticky sap.
Where beetles have bored in, blobs of sap pop out of the bark like little lumps of popcorn.
An attacked tree stays green at first, turns red within a year and then grey a few years later.
Woodpeckers love to eat these beetles.
Most asked questions about Mountain pine beetle
?How big is a mountain pine beetle?
About 5 millimetres, roughly the size of a grain of rice.
?Why does the mountain pine beetle kill trees?
It lays eggs under the bark and brings a fungus. Together they stop water and food moving inside the tree.
?Is the mountain pine beetle always bad for forests?
No. Normally it attacks old or weak trees and helps a young forest grow. Only big outbreaks harm healthy forests.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Dendroctonus ponderosae
- Group
- Beetles
- Family
- Curculionidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Coleoptera > Curculionidae
- Lives on
- North America
Where the facts come from
- Mountain pine beetle (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Thomas Quine. CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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