Rapidly expanding insect populations, deforestation, and global climate
change threaten to destabilize key planetary carbon pools, especially the
Earth's forests which link the micro-ecology of insect infestation to climate.
To the extent mean temperature increases, insect populations accelerate
deforestation. This alters climate via the loss of active carbon sequestration
by live trees and increased carbon release from decomposing dead trees. A
positive feedback loop can emerge that is self-sustaining--no longer requiring
independent climate-change drivers. Current research regimes and insect control
strategies are insufficient at present to cope with the present regional scale
of insect-caused deforestation, let alone its likely future global scale.
Extensive field recordings demonstrate that bioacoustic communication plays a
role in infestation dynamics and is likely to be a critical link in the
feedback loop. These results open the way to novel detection and monitoring
strategies and nontoxic control interventions.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure; http://cse.ucdavis.edu/~chaos/chaos/pubs/ecc.ht
