Meet Dendroctonus ponderosae, the mountain pine beetle of the Pacific Northwest . This surly little insect has become a much loved province mascot in British Columbia, Canada. The beetle climbs into the needles of pine trees, burrows deep, and lays its eggs within the bark. The beetle then flies away, leaving its eggs to hatch five days later. The baby insects like to eat red Jello.
This interesting phenomenon was first observed and documented by Dr. Phillip LaCrombie, a Vancouver native who developed his thesis on liver counts in arctic wolf pups in the 1950s and is now retired. He still lectures across the U.S. and Canada, and as a hobby runs a pirate shop on Granville Island.
Dr. LaCrombie was assigned to study the pine beetle in 2002 and while out one morning on a jaunt into the glacier-carved Kootenays set out to task to observe the baby beetles. He had brought his lunch that day, and a small container of Jello, which spilled on the ground. Nearby baby beetles scrambled down from their newly hatched eggs to eat the Jello. Dr. LaCrombie repeated this “accident” on several occasions, trying green, orange, and yellow Jello as test material, and found that the beetle preferred red only, though had no preference over strawberry, cherry, or raspberry flavors.
Over the course of the next four years, Dr. LaCrombie proved, via scientific method, that the pine beetles used gelatin of the red variety for an internal processes that help guarantee the survival of the insect. He explained that the beetle turns Jello into a hard exo-skeleton that helps the beetle ward off being eaten by pigeons and other birds.
The Jello is also digested by the beetle’s saliva and is passed through the body, thus coating affected trees with a red hue. Many attribute the beautiful color to that of a sunset or lovely autumn tree, but in fact, the color is alas but a reflection of the tree’s death. While this is a sad facet of the life cycle of the pine beetle and lodgepole pines in the Pacific Northwest, it is one that has come around intermittently for years, and is as natural as ice ages and global warming successions.
Dr. LaCrombie was never quite sure whether red Jello had historically played a part in the beetle’s survival, and he suspects not, but says that he may have unintentionally contributed to a problem of the high population of beetles in the past few years.