Patrol guards against foreign bugs

SEATTLE – Alishia Beckham uses a hand mirror and a flashlight to defend the United States from foreign invaders.

Working aboard ships three football fields long that arrive in Seattle’s bustling port stacked with truck-size cargo containers, the U.S. Immigration and Customes Enforcement agricultural specialist scours for bugs, plants or pathogens that could lay waste to native species.

She checks around door frames, pipes, lifeboat winches and other nooks where an Asian gypsy moth might have laid its eggs.

Invasive species can quickly become ecological and economical disasters. The emerald ash borer beetle has killed more than 30 million ash trees since it was detected in North America in 2002. European gypsy moths defoliate millions of forested acres every year from North Carolina to Wisconsin to Maine.

“There are so many places on a ship, it could literally take all day if you inspected every inch of the ship,” Beckham said. “We do what we can.”

Beckham carries a backpack full of tools: cards illustrating the moth’s life stages, binoculars to inspect areas of the ship she can’t reach, a paint scraper to pry off any egg masses, and a plastic container with a dead adult male and an egg mass to show crew members what she’s looking for.

The Asian gypsy moth, like its European cousin, is a rapacious leaf-eater, but it eats a wider variety of trees. Unlike the flightless European female, the Asian female can fly up to 25 miles before laying its eggs, meaning it could quickly spread across the country.

In early August, Beckham stepped aboard a ship in Seattle plastered with more than 100 Asian gypsy moth egg masses, each containing up to 1,000 eggs.

Beckham ordered the ship escorted out of U.S. territorial waters immediately by the Coast Guard before the eggs started hatching.

“If there are a hundred egg masses and they start hatching, we can’t send the ship through Puget Sound, because there are so many islands the caterpillars could land on,” she said.

After hatching, the caterpillars “balloon,” letting out a silken thread that the wind catches. They can travel up to five miles depending on conditions.

“Once the larvae start ballooning, we’re in trouble,” said Eric Johnson, the Customs Service’s agriculture chief for the Seattle area. He estimates if they hatched at a Washington port, they could infest the forests of the Cascade Range, about 30 miles away, within five years.

The federal government spends over $1.3 billion every year on detecting, eradicating and controlling invasive species, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Very few nonnative species become invasive, but a single species can cause millions of dollars in costs. Zebra mussels annually cause over $5 million in damage in the Great Lakes. Cornell University researchers estimated in 2004 that invasive species cost the U.S. economy almost $120 billion each year.

The rise in international trade has increased the opportunities for invasive species to hitchhike into the U.S.

“A continued influx of invasive species is going to be in our future,” said Jim Marra, an entomologist for Washington state’s Department of Agriculture.

Russia and Japan monitor Asian gypsy moths and share the information with U.S. officials, who use it to identify high-risk ports. The moth was detected this year in a port in China, which does not collect or share such information yet, according to Johnson.

Infestations can prompt bans on a country’s exports.

“It might be in the best interest of a foreign country to not disclose that a major, major port is infested,” said Beckham, adding, “But we’ve had very good relationships with foreign countries, from my experience. But who’s to say?”