darquingdragon asked:

What's wrong with gypsy moths?

nerdfishgirl answered:

ooohhhh yeeaahhh I was wondering if someone was gonna ask. The common gypsy moth

Lymantria dispar dispar aka the scourge of northeastern forests, destroyer of oaks, giver of rashes, stainer of clothing, etc.

The problem of course isn’t the moth (which is boring, but cute) but the caterpillar.

EVIIIILLLLL EVVIIIIIIILLLLL

Anyway - yeah these dudes are from Eurasia - idk where, but some idiot brought them over in the 1800s bc he thought they were the next silk worms (they do produce silkish stuff, but not like silkworms). And then, one daaarrrrkkkk, stooooorrrrmy night (that is actually how the story goes), the high wind knocked over his cages, and the rapacious beasts escaped into a neighboring woodlot. The hapless researcher pleaded with his neighbor to burn the forest down, but to no avail. And so the destroying plague was released.

Idk how much of that is apocryphal - but that’s the story of how they got introduced.

Since then they’ve spread all over the northeast/Mid-Atlantic - and they LOVE to eat oak trees (which the Mid-Atlantic Appalachians have a lot of). Bc they have no natural predators here, their population reaches biblical plague proportions every ten years or so. So bad, that they will - and I am not exaggerating bc I have seen them do this - almost completely defoliate entire mountainsides. Where I live, there will be so many caterpillars up in the trees that their poop sounds like rain coming down through the leaves. Most people attempt to control them by putting this sticky tape around the tree trunks, so that they can’t get up the trunk after they hatch in the spring. That’s why in many areas a lot of the trees have this dark ring of residual stickiness around them.

Residential areas will try to control them by spraying Bt (Bacillus thuringensis - a bacteria screws up their digestive systems) - which is how I got to sit in a sprayer helicopter when I was little - and see a crop duster fly over my street. In the wild areas, they’re just left to eat themselves into starvation. Unfortunately by the time that happens, they’ve gone through several high population, high defoliation years, which kills a lot of the trees. You can still see the dead trees up on some of the mountains, although they cut down the worst hit areas bc they were fire hazards.

Not only do they wreck havoc on forests, but they are seriously nasty to be around. If you skoosh them and get the chlorophyll laden insides on ur clothes - that stain is NOT coming out. And all those (kinda cute) hairs? Many of those are laden with histamine - so if a caterpillar drops on you (and they do, bc they parachute down on silky strings) - you will get a nice caterpillar shaped rash.

I hate invasive species in general, but gypsy moths are one of the more annoying and destructive ones, so I reserve slightly more hate for them.