This Tiny Beetle Is Devastating Forests in the Worst Outbreak Ever | Short Film Showcase

[Music] Not too long ago, I was really beginning to lose a lot of hope for her, for us. I was just seeing so many bad changes because they're under attack. I became interested in nature before I could walk. I was out camping, obviously very low to the ground, and so the first things I experienced were insects and fungi and things like that, and that has stuck with me ever since.

I've been working on bark beetles, fungi, and forests for about 25 years. I have such an intense passion for nature; it just translates through my entire approach to life. So, the mountain pine beetle is a really complex but really fascinating insect. Even though it's only a few millimeters long, it's capable of killing millions and millions of trees over a short period.

This is the largest mountain pine beetle outbreak ever recorded; it's something like 10 times bigger than any we've known of in the past. But also, if you look at it in the context of insect outbreaks in general, it's probably the biggest one ever recorded on the planet for any insect. Mountain pine beetle outbreaks are climate-driven; we've had an extended period of warm and dry, and that's allowed the beetle to really take off for a very long time.

So, at this point, 70 million acres across Western North America have been killed. It changes water dynamics; it changes habitat for wildlife. And so, the effect of losing these trees could have massive ramifications for a lot of things we don't typically think about. So many people look at the mountain pine beetle like the antagonists, the bad guy, but really it's just an organism doing what it does.

The outbreaks in the past have been regenerative; they actually help restore the forest. You know, we really need to take the blame off the insect and put it on where it belongs, which is human activity. It really comes back to us. I've been working in these forests where 95 to 99 percent of the trees have been killed; they're just absolutely devastated. But if you look around, you'll see that there's a tree here and a tree there, and they're perfectly fine. Why did these trees survive when none of the other trees did?

So we began to look a little bit closer, and we began to take core samples. We began to take a measure of their resin chemistry, which is basically how the beetles recognize the trees. We took collections of DNA. We see that they have characteristics that mean they may be pre-adapted to a warming climate. That's given us a lot of hope, and so now we're focusing a lot of attention on identifying these individuals that really may have what it takes to help our forests continue on.

We're in a pivotal position in time right now in a couple of ways. One is that if we don't take action to turn climate change around pretty soon, we will see catastrophic change. When we look at people, we see a sea of individuals. When we look at a forest, we see everything is the same. So we need to start putting faces on the trees out there in the forest, and if we start thinking of them that way, we can begin to manage.

[Music] You. You. [Music]