I have heard two wood lot managers state they think this suposedly begnine fungus is contributing to decline in their white oaks.

Has anyone else heard anything about this?

Reply to post by JPS, on March 30, 2002 at 20:05:13:

Yes, no only heard of it but in it up to our ears down here.

More appropriately, after several isolation attempts what we have now should be labelled an epidemic. Hypoxylon - H atropunctatum and H mediterrianium.

It never used to be considered a "travelling pathogen", yet in two years has become a very virulent spreading killer, far removed from what still the pathology labs are terming a "cultural problem associated with timber practices and drought".

There are numerous small fruiting bodies in the stromata, sexual ascospores being released to find their way to injuries that will become new infection sites. Many vectors exist, we can't wait for studies yet to be commissioned to i.d. the specific culprits, where it won't make any difference anyway. It spreads just like smoke coming out of a stack.

WE had always watched Hypox and considered it to be a secondary infection to stresses by other means, never considered it to be what kills the tree, we now stand enlightened. The schools are busy printing flyers telling us to exercise sterilization practices - like destroying the woodlot and planting new. Gulp. Drought has certainly exacerbated the stresses leading to Hypox but now that it's movement is threatening even prior healthy stands, it's time to consider a treatment - none has been promoted before. Like oak wilt, a vascular fungal parasite, Hypox kills the tree by colonizing the sapwood.

Traditional methods for upsetting the biology of vascular parasites (DED,wilt,etc.) involve injection of a sterol-inhibiting chemical into root flairs through Micro or other means. Crap, do this to thousands of commercial specimens? Right. It doesn't kill the disease, only inhibits reproduction for a time. REpeat treatments, and you chemically girdle the tree just like a two-inch deep chain saw cut. It's time we look beyond the economics of the chemical mentality and get down to some serious and affordable nutritional amendments - like a brief change in the soil pH with sulfur applications.

On a stand of commercial burr oak west of here, we had little choice but to try a point change in pH, so far (two years) it seemed to have slowed progression, along with establishing a peripheral clear-cut. REmoval of proximity trees, destruction of the wood.

REports now coming from 28 states on the growing die-backs, we associated not the drought, but air quality with deminishing levels of base line nutrients in tissue sampling of the trees - leading to long-term stress opening-up susceptablity to just such a disease as Hypox.

I hope the academic community takes the die-offs as an early warning to changes that are occuring in our environment, changes that are clouded in debate while reality sets in. This time however, I hope instead of a chemical company thinking of ways to profit from this increasing catastrophy, we all work together to see this as a canary in the coal mine.

Look-up some world sites on forest disease, see where the reports are coming from and look closely at what the pathogens are - when acid rain fell on the northeast, pathologists got busy trying to remedy tree by tree the disease that killed it, instead of looking a bit more broadly at the root cause.

I'll keep posting on our Sulfur results here, so far, so good but we have our fingers crossed.

Reply to post by Reed, on March 30, 2002 at 20:05:13:

Where are you located?

What are your sources linking tree nutrient stress with air pollution, and how did they sift out all the other variables? It sounds highly possible to me, and I've often wondered about how one would prove the links?

("REports now coming from 28 states on the growing die-backs, we associated not the drought, but air quality with deminishing levels of base line nutrients in tissue sampling of the trees - leading to long-term stress opening-up susceptablity to just such a disease as Hypox.")

Reply to post by Nathaniel Sperry, on March 31, 2002 at 12:52:23:

Reed, are most of these plants oyu have in natural stands or in tended properties?

Reply to post by Nathaniel Sperry, on March 31, 2002 at 12:52:23:

Nathaniel,


Lots of report on the web concerning damage to southern oak forests.

Thought you might also be interested in this quote closer to home of secondary observations of Hypox with SOD.

"Other agents typically associated with SOD Phytophthora-infected coast live oaks and tanoaks include the sapwood decay fungus Hypoxylon thourarsianum
(Lev.) Lloyd, two species of ambrosia beetles (Monarthrum scutellare LeConte and M. dentiger LeConte), and the western oak bark beetle
(Pseudopityophthorus pubipennis LeConte) (McPherson and others 2000).

Reply to post by JPS, on April 03, 2002 at 22:55:25:

WE're here in Central Texas.

The obvious examples of die-off are native stands. Yearly assessments are as simple as looking out the kitchen window - hillsides are very visable. To only rely on statistical reports generated by someone who only hears what he's told is tantamount to believing Henry Kissinger's autobiography on our role in Angola.

Landscape specimens include both planted hybrids and native stock, although years of observation indicate a slightly less mortality among trees introduced (speculating that root engraftments are less than native stands - a well documented vascular disease transmission vector).

We're considered an oak savanna, generally a culturally-influenced change from mid-grass prarie one century ago.

I like to jump on the documentation often, take the helm and steer away slightly from the convention, especially in disease statistics. WE're in the field, and we report on what we see. Major forest die-offs are certainly under-reported but clearly example for us opportunity to witness the canary in the coal mine.

Sloopy pathology had State officials hound-dogging the wrong disease here for over twenty years, in spite of the growing patterns of epidemic consistant with oak wilt (for only one example). This in part is one indictment to the system of documenting, appraising, and managing epidemics. Globally, we're in a serious position, you bet I implicate air quality. True, disease has been isolated and identitifed, but root cause is rarely thought-out.

Reply to post by Reed, on April 04, 2002 at 09:28:30:

I guess it all doesn't matter though.

I wish I had the experience Shigo had - along with a touch of the extremes I grew-up witnessing.

I really want to help save trees, but the sides of these battles are diverse, as I read the postings on the forestry forums trashing arborists, and arborists condemning the efforts of the logger's attempts to monoculture. Democrats snubbing Republicans, Jews killing Palistinians, Japanese killing whales, Muslims killing Christians, Capitalists killing peasants.

The sick trees in someone's yard translate into real estate values, oftentimes more important than asthetics - and we can help them live with rainbows of available conventional or alternative methods. However, from a forester's viewpoint this does nothing to address the growing problems of epidemic - the threats killing our woods that eventually move into our yards.

The globe is in serious disarray, please we must all recognize this and end the debate. Minds so well learned on specific diseases need to coalesce into cooperation on addressing the true root causes instead of profit-motivated attempts to fix the squeaks when they sound. Massive tree die-offs are the signals that something's amiss, just like cancer clusters in former industrial sites-turned tract housing. Oncologists can learn to treat cancers, but they know little or nothing about what causes it therefore cannot be effective on upsetting the growing statistics of occurrance.

Oak wilt, DED, Hypox, insect populations, loss of habitat, air quality - all things gone nuts, there are simple solutions, but they have to come quickly and all at once. Instead of the efforts spent seperating our colored glass bottles for recycling, we should perhaps plan a trip to Washington, because the voting for issues doesn't even seem to matter anymore. Florida proved that.

I don't know what to do, honestly, but I do know that something needs to be done before it's too late, as most of my academic friends seem to think.

That's all, just some thought before I go out today and do a few removals of some giant dead oaks.

Reed Holt
Texas