Slick bark stymies pine-bark beetles, researcher finds

For this work, doctoral student who will officially graduate next month wins Young Investigator Prize from British Ecological Society

Scott Ferrenberg, a U.S. Geological Survey ecologist who will graduate from the University of Colorado Boulder with his Ph.D. next month, has won a British Ecological Society (BES) Young Investigator prize. The prize—one of only five awarded each year—recognizes the best research papers published in BES journals by early career scientists.



Ferrenberg won the Haldane Prize for the best paper in the BES journal Functional Ecology in 2014.

The paper is based on his Ph.D. research at the University of Colorado Boulder, which resurrects the “slippery hypothesis” or the role smooth bark plays in helping trees defend themselves against insect attack.

The prize, which includes £250, a year's BES membership plus a year's subscription to the journal, will be presented at the British Ecological Society’s annual meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland, in December.

Ecologists once thought that smooth bark on trees and shrubs acted as an anatomical defense against epiphytic vegetation and phytophagous insects, but the idea had fallen out of favor.

Together with Jeffry Mitton, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at CU-Boulder, Scott studied bark beetle attack on Pinus flexilis—a pine species also known as limber pine, which has both smooth and rough bark surfaces. Their aim was to test the role of bark defense against insects.

The results of their study, which involved field surveys and experiments in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, were strikingly straightforward: bark beetle attacks were overwhelmingly located on rough bark surfaces and virtually absent from smooth bark.



Experimental tests of bark beetles' ability to grip smooth versus rough bark revealed that bark beetles have difficulty gripping and quickly fell from smooth bark but not from rough bark. They also found that even partial coverage by smooth bark on a tree's trunk significantly reduced total bark beetle attacks.

Ferrenberg’s interest in plant-insect interactions began at the University of Maryland, College Park, as he worked on his master’s in entomology with the late Robert Denno. A lifelong fascination with western North America's conifer forests led him to a research position in Sequoia National Park, California, where he studied bark beetle responses to trees injured by prescribed fires.

Interest in evolutionary aspects of the bark beetle-conifer system drew Ferrenberg to CU-Boulder, where he completed his Ph.D. under Mitton’s guidance.

Scott is now a postdoctoral scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey's Canyonlands Research Station in Moab, Utah, where he studies the impacts of climate change on biological soil crust and plant communities.

This announcement was issued by the British Ecological Society. For more information on the British Ecological Society and the Young Investigator prizes, click here. The paper “Smooth bark surfaces can defend trees against insect attack: resurrecting a ‘slippery’ hypothesis,” by Scott Ferrenberg and Jeffry B. Mitton (Functional Ecology, 28: 837–845), is available here.

April 14, 2015