The Canaan fir may have become the giant of the Christmas tree industry, but it can’t protect itself in the wild from a bug that looks like a tiny ball of fluff.
The tiny, wingless Balsam woolly adelgid is destroying the once-prolific fir tree, native to north-central West Virginia’s Canaan Valley.
In Ohio and elsewhere, tree farms have become the main source of the transplanted Canaan, and vigilance is required to protect it. Farms across Ohio spray their tree stock yearly with pesticides to prevent the bug from burrowing within the fir’s bark and leaving its poisonous saliva.
The pest “is a tough one. When you get it in there, it’s difficult to get it out,” said Jim Gibson, owner of Timbuk Farms in Granville, where about 70 percent of the cut-your-own Christmas trees are Canaan firs. “In commercial production, we can treat it. And it usually takes care of the problem. But we have to be aware of it.”
Canaan firs range from $30 to more than $75 depending on size, according to Timbuk’s website.
Forty years ago, Ohio State University researchers studied the West Virginia trees and found they were the perfect replacement for the more-expensive Fraser firs. Genetic engineering produced a species that Ohio State owns the rights to and leases to Timbuk Farms’ Canaan Fir Tree Co.
Andrew Liebhold, an entomologist with the U.S. Forest Service in Morgantown, W.Va., said the Canaan fir’s decline in its natural habitat is important because it eliminates part of the state’s naturally occurring ecosystem.
The threat to a native species should concern everyone, not just scientists. The Balsam woolly adelgid also kills Fraser firs and other conifers throughout the Midwest and East.
“We’re raising this little fir up for attention because it’s an example of a larger problem,” said Randall Edwards, spokesman for the Nature Conservancy of Ohio.
Like the emerald ash borer’s effect on the American ash tree, the pests’ damage is largely invisible until it’s too late.
“It could be that the only place you see the Canaan fir in the future is on tree farms,” Edwards said. “And we think that would be unfortunate.”
Consumers of trees can help contain the pest by buying only from established nurseries, not disposing of trees in backyards and not moving firewood great distances.
“I’m kind of happy they’re being used as Christmas trees,” Edwards said. “Genetically, the subspecies is going to persist even if we lose the natural stands.”