Oak Wilt! Burr Oaks and Alamo Injection? Urgent Help?

[Lisad]

I have Oak Wilt. Had 3 tree companies out. Plan is to trench, remove lost causes, and inject potential 'savables' with Alamo.
Only Red oaks have succumed. The Burr oaks seem fine.

I was told:

1. Reds & Burrs don't root graft between the species. The only way the Burrs could get it is via beetles, etc.
2. 2 Companies say I don't have to inject the Burrs with Alamo. 1 Company wants to do it.
3. We are talking 3 Majestic-sized burrs & 1 smaller one. The cost is astronomical.

We are more than willing to sink alot of cash into saving our trees, but we are by no means wealthy and injecting the burrs. Estimated cost on the burrs alone is $1350.00. I just hate to toss away money needlessly and I don't know what to do here & who to listen to.

Because of the severe nature of Oak Wilt, I don't have much time to gather more estimates, opinions. I've tried searching the net & can't find specific advice on if I should inject the burrs or not. I'm going to call the Morton Arboretum Plant Clinic when they open for advice & also have an email to the U of I Plant Clinic.

If there are any knowledgeable tree people with Oak Wilt. I'd appreciate your advice on this matter. I have to make a quick decision here.

 

[Kneejerk Bombas]

I would not inject the white oaks.
I see many pockets of oak wilt in our area, and without exception the reds are the only ones that fall. White oaks do get oak wilt, but not from the reds, not that I have seen anyway. White oaks can also be treated and saved even after they become symtomatic. Just keep a close eye on them.
I am not impressed with Alamo because the injections really only move the chemical up the tree, not down into the roots. This means the fungus can spread into the tree's roots and be there just waiting for you to stop treating your tree. Here lies the problem, the injection sites take a long time to calus over. Often times the root flairs get covered with old injection holes and it's hard to find spots to inject. Sometime the alamo squirts out the injection hole from last year, rather than going up the tree.
All these injuries at the base of a tree could mean a weakened trunk at some point down the road.
How long are you going to continue to annually treat he trees? Is this treatment a stop-gap fix, until they come up with something better?
It is conceivable that by injecting the trees, you are giving the fungus a hideout, until these same trees can grow past the trenches you cut and regraft to the untreated trees on the other side of the barrier.
YOur number one defense is trenching. Trench as much as you can and trench deep.

 

[TREETX]

Down here we plant burs instead of live or red oaks because they are OW resistant.

Never injected a white oak.

$1350 may be cheaper than buying 100 DBH inch oak trees.

Macro or micro injection?

Go macro

Micro is an exercise in fultility - better off mailing the money to a 3rd world country than doing micro.

What kind of bits??

What time of day??

The applicator matters here.

 

[Reed]

Trenching is pointless unless you have healthy reds within modelled reach peripheries' distance from confirmed infections of either variety - burrs will host and spread but not succumb. Injections are pointless for either varieties due to solubility, poor translocation rates, killing of vascular tissue at injection sites, and decreasing effectiveness over time periods...repeat treatments are necessary and hosts rarely survive multiple shots. It's a real estate agent's tool only. It doesn't kill the disease, inhibits reproduction only. Beware of sales tactics, pre-tree service. They only promote what they've been told and it's not the truth. They don't know that yet.

Overall conclusions are that 20% or greater number of reds will survive. Brace yourself for the loss of reds. Things are changing and not much we can do about it. Fatalistic, yes. Reality.

Confirm Tex?

 

[Kneejerk Bombas]

What do you mean 20% of reds will survive? We see 100% loss of reds within modelled reach peripheries' distance from confirmed infections. Or are you refering to the total population of reds in the world?

And I'm also curious about your statement that "burrs will host and spread but not succumb". They will host and spred to reds through root grafts?

 

[Reed]

Although the data doesn't support engraftment between two variants of oak, we've excavated and saved several examples. Our reds are Quercus texana, thin barked and distinctively thin cambium, yours have a more dispersed vascular interior. In general the populations bare-out the 20% estimate.

When a species can host doesn't mean they succumb, it means it manages the infection...the parasitic fungi still can survive but eventually finds no exit potential through the perforated cell-walls of each vascular cell - the hyphea can not reach around the obstructive tylosis response of the Burrs, ultimately dying from lack of nutrient flow. That's compartmentalization, but take a susceptable and infected and injected specimen, it will translocate further. Again, ALAMO is a fungistat, not a fungicide...it only inhibits sexual reproduction of the fungi, it doesn't kill it.

 

[John Paul Sanborn]

My understanding of red oak susceptability is that is does not form tyloses and has no way of blocking off its vascular tissue from the hypeal progression.

is there any understand=ing as to how these small poplulations can tolerate the infection?

one method I've heard of in dealing with the white subgenus is to combine high maintinance cultural practices with Cambistat. A program of soil aeration, amendment and periodic deep watering to maintain mositure and promote good gas exchange in the soil.

Nichols in mequon, WI claims to have very good results with a number of systemic problemsusing the above cultural methods, including Cytospora in spruce. (W/O the cambistat)

 

[TREETX]

Reed and I have jawed about this for hours after cruising mile after mile of dead liveoaks and red oaks (Q.texana/buckleyii??).

One conclusion I have come to is oak wilt in TX is not the same ow as in Wisconsin. The ow in Austin seems to be the same ow as in other towns, but there are exceptions. Some places, injections and trenching has repeatedly failed - Comfort or Sisterdale come to mind here. I mean privately done injections and others that were university/ciba/novartis sponsored.

I would say 10-20% of both the reds and live oaks don't die from ow. This experience is pretty much limited to the hill country of TX. I have not observed ow in shumards or other reds. I did see a shumard graveyard dead today in an ow center, other trees being live oaks.

I got my start in tree work by doing nothing but ow injections - my forest path prof got me the job. I got tired of ow work. It is (no offense) similar to dealing with terminally ill cancer patients. You are almost always the bearer of bad news. You are then forced to use accepted textbook methods that all to often fail. I think selling ow solutions is a bold and noble job. A true love of trees and want to help preserve these treasured oaks for their clients and future generations......or it is a slippery slope to satan's whore house by selling false promises of saving and resurrecting the dead. Selling fear sucks - putting you effort in to finding solutions is noble. Fine line....

 

[John Paul Sanborn]

I agree whole heartedly Nate. One reason I dont do any chemical work anymore. so much of it needs fine timeing and other variables that can work against you.

Products are labled for the problems, but the efficacy is not stated. You need to call around to find people who have tried it.

More and more I find that those people who go for the long term "organic" maintainace have better anicdotal evidancethen honest chemical workers, and usually with smaller populations.

When sell a job on a tree with a systemic infection or a difficult infestation, I will say we will try to get the tree healtier so that it can tolerate the problem better. Adjust the pH, add minor and trace elements to the soil, change the micro environment so the rootzone is cooler, moister and better airated.

Something just popped into my head, I read oyur post to say that trees in the boonies have a lower mortality rate?? Could this mean that there are more of the deeper rooting mesic plants out there, thus better gas excahnge and water penetration?

 

[Reed]

Wilt doesn't discriminate much between urban and rural but overall, cities have varieties in species, most of the older live oaks were saved of course during urban sprawl but select destruction to make way broke (for the most part) the continuity of single-species stands. This upsets epidemic requirements a bit but overland vectors make-up for that loss - and one tree gets nailed, it's vegetative habits of multiple stands and common root systems soon spell death for the others in proximity. That's the trenching mentality, but there's no effective way to sever live oak roots that may engraft as far as 100 feet away or 15 feet underground.

Out here in the rural areas we have a monoculture that invites epidemic - most of these forests didn't exist prior to white people arriving, natural controls existed (principally fires). This was grassland years ago. Quite the reverse from northern or eastern areas. The oaks dying constitute a good ninety percent of our hardwood make-up.

Our soils are rock, with detritus from falling leaves and grasses supplying most of the thin layers of highly calciferous dirt. Our live oaks find their ways down under, thru, and around the ???? rock, and root models here transcend the norms of the north and the trenching studies published in MN or WS can't be logically applied here.

There are other differences urban areas present, only speculative insofar as tree health and resistance to common disease events and one is air quality of course, the other's mainly cultural like asphalt up to the trunk, metal roof reflections to underside of leaf surfaces, herbicides and fert for lawn covers, and crappy utility crew pruning habits, etc. Trees here next to streams have unadulterated moisture rates, trees on hilltops adapt to extreme periods of prolonged drought - if any differences exist between one or the other exist as far as hosting wilt or succumbing to it, I notice water-constant trees die faster, infection rates actually higher than hilltop-which I attribute to the disease being a vascular feeder in as much need of moisture as the host. Dought actually helps slow the progression of wilt - systems shut-down.

PRactices like you mention have shown an increase in survival, in infection centers, on diseased trees, and proximity contacts. It's give and take however, some do...some don't. Even with "no hands on" approach, some live, some die. Extreme pH changes, "bleaching" soils, and some limited broad-spectrum fungicidal controls have shown some results as well. It's going to take a combination approach to silver bullet this thing, but parties won't work together based on past bias and indifference. I'm feel responsible for much of that - came on heavy condem,ning the chemical industry's funding habits and like mine, they too had an interesting lack of efficacy data.

To accept the losses is pretty much what people are resorting to here - composition of our forests are changing rapidly, here with wilt and urbanization and air quality, other places with changes contributing to insect increases (warmer winters, etc.). WE just get to watch it all happen, and in my case, help remove some of the sorely missed and dying giants. Offering advice on replacements, thought-out a bit better than the advice of years past - "plant American Elms toe to toe". What we did for treatments on a nutritional level, years past, had been statistically significant, only treatming trees now that have survived and for friends that call us back again and again - no new programs or business attempts to further it, it's not worth it as a too hot potato. As Nate pointed out, they could go either way no matter what you do. Take downs are black and white, no gray zones of expectations.

 

[TREETX]

I notice water-constant trees die faster, infection rates actually higher than hilltop-which I attribute to the disease being a vascular feeder in as much need of moisture as the host. Dought actually helps slow the progression of wilt - systems shut-down

I have noticed this as well and it is what I tell clients when they ask if fert (N) and lots of water will help make their trees resist the disease spreading from next door. IT THRIVES on a healthy vascular system. I am speaking of the vascular system and not of immune/defense system.

there's no effective way to sever live oak roots that may engraft as far as 100 feet away or 15 feet underground.

On these hard soils or lack there of (limestone), rooting actually goes deeper and is less affected by trenching activities or compaction activities. That is a fact. Live oaks north and east of Austin on black clay soils have shallow root systems and bad reactions to encroaching utility trenching or compaction activities.

to silver bullet this thing...

Who knows, someday maybe......A large part of me would love to see a good July fire make this land what it used to be - a sea of grass with oak motts and thick canyons. Real grasss, not bermuda or dallis or some threeawn.

Much could be done to save these giants, but they are all fenced in and owned by private landowners anyway. TX has very little public land so it is a fight for those deep absentee landowner pockets more than a fight to save trees.....

 

[Reed]

True, we are a private property paradise. Even floating down a public waterway might find the twin barrels of double-ought buck stuck between yer eyes as you try to explain it's your right to enjoy the river. Yeah, right you commie hippie tree hugger, now git and don't come back!

Okay, then it's a good thing that Bubba looses his oaks. Serves him right.

On the other hand, it's a sad chapter in Forest Disease History. Never has such a distructive hardwood disease cost America so much, but we're stuck in time, holding hard to what we perceive as constants and familiar. Things change, we're loath to accept it. Mom and Pop replaced by WalMart and DARPA and Homeland security, these things we can control, Mt. Pinatubo we can't.

The best thing wilt's done is stimulate research to higher heights, albeit economic incentive currenty, students are seeing mistakes and working towards new questions not thought about prior. The soils are being built by rotting wood, and tree companies find work beyond artful designer-pruning for the wealthy.

Anyone ever thought about spraying a magestic giant with epoxy emulsion enough to perserve it like a cheap Mall display? Permatree? No leaves to rake, no water to waste, like plastic floral arraingements, like America now. Disease free because it's dead and forever, like the milk jugs and baby diapers under the landfill.

Dr. Juzwick had it in the bag years ago. Bacterial antagonists, but her funding was cut on that one. Choices based on fiscal returns, not common sense. Let's spray 'em with fiberglass why don't we?

Ah. Gotta go and remove another dead one today, all take care and watch it out there.


Oakwilt

 

[John Paul Sanborn]

High N sucks, but amendments with a broad spectum of elements....OOPS, jumped on my soap box again

Case by case i understand, I've never heard of anyone saving a flagging Ulmusamericanna with cultural improvements. Though O. nova-ulmi seems to like drought stressed trees better, Tylosis more effective in healthy ones??

Then there are some who say that a short dry period is good for a healthy tree because this is usualy a natural part of the cylcle in which the species evolved....

 

[Reed]

The only thing bad about seasonal drought is that it effects adversely, the things Humans plant. That's a general sweeping statement to be sure, because it's well documented our activities exacerbate recent extremes, but at it's core it rings of reality. Coastal burmuda grass for forage? Corn monocultures mutated to withstand AAtrex and Atrazine? Soy plants with no roots but able to face a three-dose increase in glyphosphate applications? Come on.

Rice farms between Sacramento and San Fransico Bay. Corn in West-central Nebraska and the Texas panhandle. Silver maples on freeway interchanges in....Nevada??? Gee.

Not that I'm all for accepting women leave their leg and underarm hair grow to weavable lengths or personally not applying deordorant, we need replacement in the big cities for the trees we decimated to pour concrete, but native stands (this doesn't mean Texas' oaks are "natural") were there for a reason, look at the sky some twilight and ask yourself the question.."what made all that air?" "what makes our atmosphere unique and necessary to how we got here and where we stand?" And more importantly..."What's happening to our skies?, and why?"

Oh oh, my "four o'clocks" are wilting, better turn-on the sprinklers.

And yes, 'N'' does suck. Our well water is too high in nitrites and nitrates to drink. It's because of the coastal Burmuda grass in the pastures.

 

[John Paul Sanborn]

Along with coppiced treelines, I've been trying to convince people to use native mezic herbacious plants in roadside ditches and runnoff channels, as apposed to daylilleys and cattails. Especially if they "fert" the lawn regularly.

I've read recently that around 1% of the native prarie is left in the state, and very little of it is virgin remnant. Most are resetablished demonstrations. And those are designed to have more of the aesthetically desireable flowers then natural distributions. Good for the soil though many have 18 ft of root depth

 

[Yellowdog]

forgot picture

 

[Yellowdog]

forgot picture

This is an after. House has no trees now.

 

[Reed]

Grapetown....three miles from my old ranchhouse.

Activity in and around the trees, the more "human" it is the faster the oaks infect and die. Just MTCW.

Wanna see the motts I treated twelve years ago? Test and controls on exacting protocols. These areas got my butt in severe trouble politically. Silver bullet? Yeah, right. This is G.W.'s America and Clinton's wasn't any better, nor were the last ten presidents. Invent a moustrap and corporate America will kill you and steal the notes. Literally.

No longer treating, just taking the dead away....like body bag loaders with no opinions (sorry, they're called "transfer tube insertion specialists" now).

To this I just keep my mouth and mind shut, except to thwart anyone's idea that injections might work - if I can't establish an alternative to dictates, I can certainly hurt the sales of them. That's MY American right, just like the Office of Management and Budget's request to the White House that the President control all public-release health threats for "security's" sake. I now shut my mouth, just like our big daddy. Feel safer. God bless America.

No longer inhabiting the areas of aggressive infection that somehow have stands of healthy oaks within. If a poor family of hispanics want some tree secrets I give 'em all I know...if a dynasty ranch insists I cure the sick, the heck with them. I'll cut those down and haul 'em off. That's what America's done to me.

Sorry, diatribe flowed. Packing for saner climes and a future.

America deserves oak wilt and body counts (biologic casualties).

 

[Yellowdog]

I am of the mind that if I can do some little good on the planet so much the better. It was awful to see the destruction on the way from Comfort to Grapetown and from Kerrville to Fredricksburg. So many dead giants especially along the creeks. From Campe Verde to Centerpoint there are entire ridges of dead trees. Some people say it has passed through but it doesn't work like that, does it? It's always here, right? So, there's really nothing to do on a large scale because you can't control all your neighbors? If all the spanish oaks were gone from this area I wonder if that would stop the spread?

 

[Reed]

Good question but no. The spanish oaks were implicated with the nasty blame of having the reproductive mats with the sticky spores that insect chose to feast upon but finding many live oaks with the same pathologies and forcing a few academics to look at them changed that perspective from the Ivy halls, although reluctantly.

We've documented many spanish oak survivors, the tree we used to term "the canary in the coal mine". Things change, just like the mutation in the disease caused by the half-baked attempt to suppress it genetically. Super killer from a natural selection, localized parasitic fungi. I pretty much blame an individual (name witheld) with the epidemic becoming one. Either way, we have one on our hands now.

I'm seeing and smelling new diseases here that lack textbook analysis, should either start writing new pathologies or buy some more saws and hire more removal experts. Hypoxylon that's moving faster than a forest fire, Amarellia that's consuming cedars as well as oaks, and rainfall (just this morning) that hits the same pH in my guage as vinegar. I thought I had mentioned this about ten years ago at a disease summit for oaks in Central Texas but got laughed-out and asked where my pot comes from. (It came from my lab, incedently, but that was then and far beyond the point...I was treating a systemic blood cell cancer at the time).

Sky was falling then, it's half-fallen now, and we're just paying the price.

There are some very simplistic fundamentals in treating this disease event, just as washing hands before performing amputations in 1918 was such a far-fetched "bewitched" idea, but systems are in place that prohibit simplicity and stiffle careful thought. We have experts now, one's who worked hard at getting that piece of gilded paper that promises a rewarding career, as long as one doesn't question his mentors. Knowledge has been established, there's no room to ammend or update. And notions that man can cause such destructiuon is.... well, tell a cop that keeping a nun off a flight isn't making America safer and you have our State Forest Service in charge of this epidemic, controlling it, managing it carefully, and acheiving great successes.

The cure is pretty much the same as the old hermit that died last year out past Pecos had mentioned once. Also the wetback from Matamoros. It's simple, too bad it's potentially deadly. Not for the trees, but for the practitioner, not as a toxin, but as a pathogen with political potential. That's America now.

Let's get together for a beer, eh? Talk about it some more, in passing.

Reed