The scolitines devour everything that surrounds the coniferous trees and end up killing them by preventing water and nutrients from the soil from reaching the highest branches.
“These insects wreaked havoc throughout Central and Eastern Europe, especially starting in 2018,” Markus Melin, a scientist at the Finnish Institute of Natural Resources, told AFP.
The risk of the epidemic spreading is “much higher now” due to global warming, he argues. “We have to accept it and adapt. Things are changing very fast.”
The threat is generally much higher in southern Finland, but in the hot summer of 2021 these xylophages wreaked havoc “far north” in the Kainuu region.
“They benefit from warming”
“It’s a well-known phenomenon: bark beetles are one of the species that benefit most from global warming to spread,” Melin says.
These beetles choose trees already weakened by hot summers and lack of water.
The increasingly warm climate also speeds up the life cycle of these beetles. “Their mortality rate is going down and they are reproducing much faster,” says Melin.
Although at first they choose the weakest trees, once they are very numerous, they attack healthy trees.
If forest rangers do not react in time by removing the weaker trees, “suddenly the scolitines, being very numerous, can attack healthy trees,” explains Melin, “accelerating the cycle of destruction.”