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Huntington Beach removing trees infected with harmful beetles

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Tiny beetles that have been wreaking havoc on trees across Southern California now are causing problems in Huntington Beach.

About 65 trees in Central Park that are infested with polyphagous shot hole borers are being removed because the beetles can weaken a tree and cause limbs to fall.

On Tuesday, a city crew and private tree trimmers were busy taking out infected trees, marked with a red dot near the base of their trunks. The eradication effort will continue through mid-August to try to ensure that other trees do not fall victim to the beetles, which are slightly larger than a sesame seed.

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Central Park has 4,192 trees. Several trees in Lambert Park also have been infected, experts said.

In April, a limb from a Central Park sycamore fell after an infestation made it brittle, city spokeswoman Julie Toledo said.

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“The city is working diligently to resolve the beetle issue,” Toledo wrote in an email Wednesday. “The last thing we want to do is take down trees, but when an aggressive insect attacks, we have to take measures that will help protect the more than 4,000 trees in Central Park, as well as look out for public safety. We will continue to monitor and eradicate this invasive beetle pest.”

The polyphagous shot hole borer is a species of ambrosia beetle that may have originated in Southeast Asia, said Akif Eskalen, a plant pathologist at UC Riverside who has been studying the insect since 2012, when he first found infected avocado trees in Los Angeles.

“But the problem has been in California since 2003,” he said.

Experts don’t know how the species arrived in Southern California. Eskalen said it probably came in wood-based packing materials. In April, officials at UC Irvine discovered about 2,000 of the more than 30,000 trees at the university were infected.

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Unlike a termite, which damages a tree by consuming it, the polyphagous shot hole borer infects a tree with a fungus it carries in its mouth. The beetle burrows inside the tree, where the fungus spreads in the tunnels it creates. The fungus is later harvested to feed the beetle’s larvae, Eskalen said.

The fungus also acts as a pathogen, slowly spreading throughout the tree and ridding it of water and nutrients until it dies.

anthonyclark.carpio@latimes.com

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