The Burmese python may be the Everglades’ most infamous invader, but a host of exotic plants like melaleuca and old world climbing fern pose far bigger ecological threats. Over the decades, they have swallowed marshes, mangrove forests and tree islands whole.
On Tuesday, federal and state agencies broke ground on a research facility in Davie that scientists hope will produce what may be the most promising weapons in Florida’s long struggle to control the spread of exotic plants.
It’s a “bug nursery.”
The project, a major expansion of the U.S. Agricultural Research Service’s invasive-plant research laboratory, will be capable of raising mass swarms of “bio-control agents” such as the melaleuca snout beetle, one of several bugs that scientists have imported to attack the notorious, water-sucking Australian tree.
Though the $16 million lab is a drop in the bucket of the billions spent on the Everglades, the agencies bankrolling it say controlling exotics is one of the biggest challenges to restoring the Glades.
“In terms of impact, this project is huge,” said Col. Al Pantano Jr., commander of the Jacksonville district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is building the project as part of the Everglades restoration effort. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, the South Florida Water Management District and the University of Florida are partners in the expansion, which is expected to be completed by next September.
Ted Center, research leader of the USDA’s invasive-plant lab, believes the facility will allow scientists to expand a program that has registered a number of successes, topped by the melaleuca snout beetle. Found in Australia and released in South Florida in 1997, it doesn’t kill trees. But its larvae munch young leaves and stems, knocking back seed output.
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