Grafton Lakes State Park Press Release
My First Summer at Grafton:
Hi, my name is Wren Martinson! I’m very excited to be a part of the Grafton Lakes State Park team. This summer I participated in an initiative to prevent the invasive emerald ash borer from killing ash trees in our park.
Armed with a box of wasps and a day of training from a regional biologist, I marched out into our woods and released the wasps onto ash trees. Why, you may ask, was I bringing wasps into the park? A study of over 10 years has shown that these tiny 1/4-inch wasps seek out and kill emerald ash borers with minimal risk to disrupting the environment. And no, they do not sting! They use their ovipositor, their egg-laying apparatus, to lay their eggs in the emerald ash borer larvae. When the wasp eggs hatch, they kill the emerald ash borer larvae before it has a chance to mature and reproduce. Once the local infestation of ash borers has subsided, the wasps will die out too since they solely rely on the emerald ash borer to lay their eggs in. The ecosystem can then resume its natural course.
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