Bye-bye beetle: Chicago rid of Asian longhorned beetle

When Asian longhorned beetles were discovered in Ravenswood in 1998, George Toma was 4.

"I just saw guys with chainsaws all around," said Toma, now 14. "I wasn't sure what was going on."

Soon, he knew. All of the trees on his block were gone.

So when Ald. Gene Schulter (47th) announced Thursday that the pesky, tree-killing bug officially has been eradicated from Illinois, Toma and his neighbors cheered.

When the beetles first showed up, no cure existed for infested trees, so city officials cut them down. More than 1,450 were chopped down and shred in various parts of Chicago as a way to stave the spread of the pest.

"I just remember all the trucks," said Lauren Cardo, 19. "It was loud all the time."

But according to Cardo, the attack of the beetles rallied her neighbors to fight to save Chicago's greenery.

"We had in our yearbook in '99 a whole section dedicated to it," she said.

Students at the Pilgrim Lutheran Church and School, where Thursday's pronouncement was made, wrote poems and stories about the beetles and the missing trees.

She said, "I've never seen the community so strong about the environment."

City, state and federal agencies contributed, too, mounting a coordinated attack against the foreign pest to protect elms, maples, ash and other susceptible species. So far the bugs have cost state and federal governments more than $269 million dollars and caused the death of more than 30,000 trees.

In Chicago, city workers combed the city searching for pockmarked trees, pierced with tiny holes.

"I followed the tree climbers all over the city," said Lewis Bora, 14, of Ravenswood. "They had weird shoes with spikes on the bottom."

"They would cut them [trees] down with chainsaws and then shred them," Bora said.

Advertising campaigns warned residents about the beetle, telling them to report any sightings of the white-speckled black bug. With its long antennae - twice as long as its 1- to 1.5-inch body - the Asian longhorned stood out.

"It's a very big, showy beetle," said Christine Markham, director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Asian Longhorned Beetle Program.

According to Markham, all of Chicago's affected areas were discovered by attentive residents, including the last sighting, at Lincoln Park's Oz Park in 2003.

The beetle showed up on U.S. soil in New York City in 1996, then in Chicago two years later. A native of China, Korea and Japan, it is believed to have hitchhiked here in wooden shipping crates in the mid-'90s.

Lack of knowledge about the bug made the first few years of eradication efforts particularly difficult.

"We didn't have a lot of tools," Markham said. "There was a real learning curve in the very beginning of the program."

In 2000 the USDA discovered an insecticide that would kill the beetles and their larvae without harming the trees. An army of tree doctors injected more than 89,000 city trees with the chemical in 2004, at a cost of $3.5 million.

Infected trees require one insecticide treatment per year for three years, and then they are immune to Asian longhorned beetles for one additional year.

So if the beetles return to Chicago, the cycle would start all over again, introducing the bug to the next generation of Ravenswood youngsters.

But nobody wants to think about that, especially those who don't remember the chainsaws.

At Thursday's ceremony, although the focus was on the beetle triumph, the first-, second- and third-graders in the audience were more interested in digging in the dirt for earthworms.

In the shade of the young saplings lining North Winchester Avenue, the kids huddled together for a closer look at one of the harmless wrigglers.

"Just hold it on your finger," one boy said as his friend pulled a slimy worm from the soil. "I love worms."