The Bugs Rescuing the Baseball Bats

A blue beer cooler at his feet, John Vandenberg stood at the lip of a grove of ash trees here earlier this month and clasped his hands together in anticipation. The next phase of a great conflict was about to commence at his word. Inside the cooler, beneath a bag of Styrofoam peanuts, rested four clear plastic soda cups, and inside those cups buzzed 482 bugs that might just rescue an iconic instrument of American sport: the baseball bat. Soon, Vandenberg, a scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, would release the insects—two species of wasp, to be specific—into these Hudson Valley woods. By doing so, he would initiate an entomological tete-a-tete between the wasps and the emerald ash borer, a green-winged, torpedo-shaped beetle that looks at the gleaming shaft of wood in Alex Rodriguez's hands and sees a scrumptious meal for its children. The emerald ash borer (EAB for short) poses a direct threat to the national pastime: It feasts on ash wood, which is often used to make major-league baseball bats. First spotted in New York in 2009, the beetle has since infiltrated the southwestern region of the state—areas that furnish ash for eponymous bats such as Louisville Slugger and Rawlings Adirondack. Already, the pest's larvae have eaten through thousands of trees in 15 states and parts of Canada, according to the U.S. Forest Service, and after failing to stem the beetle's spread east, researchers have called in reinforcements. They've begun introducing Asian wasps—the borer's natural predators—into New York's forest ecosystem in an attempt to slow the beetle's infestation and assure the survival of the state's ash trees. And, in turn, of ash baseball bats...more