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My Minnesota brings you the voices and stories of interesting people living and working in Minnesota’s wild and working lands. You will get practical tips you can use in your community, and deepen your connection to our state's incredible environment. Join University of Minnesota Extension as we speak with researchers, land managers and local experts who are working to better understand, conserve, and care for Minnesota's waters, wildlife, and natural landscapes.
Hey, welcome to My Minnesota. This is a new podcast from the University of Minnesota Extension. I'm Eli Sagore, an Extension Forestry Specialist based at the Cloquet Forestry Center and I'm really happy to be here for our first episode. Why don't we start by introducing ourselves?
Amy:Hi. I'm Amy Rager. I'm an extension educator housed in Morris, and I work primarily with the Minnesota Master Naturalist program. And I'm really glad to be here and looking forward to exciting conversations here as well.
Peter:And I'm Peter Diezer, an extension specialist based out of Moorhead. I focus on forest dependent wildlife and the connections between our healthy forests and the wildlife species that, live and reside in them.
Eli:Awesome. All right, and I'm excited we've got a guest today. So some episodes you're just going to hear Amy and Peter and me and I talking, but on some episodes like today we're going to have guests and it'll be a variety of different kinds of people. Today we've got Grace. Grace is a member of our Extension Forestry team who is going to be working on oak wilt.
Eli:She's been with us for a while now. Grace, welcome. And why don't you start by telling us a little bit about what oak wilt is and why people need to know about it.
Grace:Thanks, Eli. I'm so excited to be here. Yeah, so I work on oak wilt. Oak wilt is an important pathogen in Minnesota. It's a fungal pathogen of oak trees and it can infect all different species of oaks, but it affects red oaks most quickly.
Grace:So with red oaks, it can kill them within weeks to months. With white oaks, they can also easily be killed by it, but they often are able to survive a little bit longer. But regardless, it's a big problem in Minnesota woods.
Eli:Okay, so oak wilt. So you said it's a fungal disease and it kills a lot of trees. Think we're coming into the time where we're about to see a lot of oak wilt mortality, right? So do you want to tell us a little bit more about the timing? Is it like a long, gradual decline?
Eli:Is it a sudden thing? What should people look for?
Grace:Yeah, so the symptoms are most apparent in July and August, but you can really see them whenever there are leaves on the oak trees. So basically what it looks like is a tree gets infected and then it'll start to show the symptoms of oak wilt, which are basically as kind of like it sounds, they're kind of wilting leaves. So the leaves will start to kind of bronze or sometimes they'll look kind of waterlogged and that'll start kind of at the outside edges of the canopy. So that can be like the top of the canopy or the outsides. And then as the disease progresses on a tree, it'll move kind of lower and deeper into the canopy.
Grace:And so with red oaks that can happen within as little as a few weeks to a month, that they'll go from starting to have those first symptoms to completely dead. With white oaks, takes a little longer. So for anyone who's not familiar, have two different, there's two different kind of groups of oaks in Minnesota and in general, I guess. There's the red oaks which have the pointier leaves kind of generally speaking, and then there's white oaks which have more rounded leaves. And oak wilt affects these two different groups of oaks differently.
Grace:So with the red oaks, those are the ones with the pointy leaves, they die really, really quickly after they get oak wilt. And then within the white oak group, we have bur oaks and other white oaks. Bur oaks can survive a little bit longer than red oaks, so sometimes they'll hold on for a few years. And white oaks can survive for much longer. They don't necessarily survive for much longer, but they can survive for many years after getting oak wilt and they'll kind of have different branches die off.
Grace:Whereas with red oaks, they'll die pretty much within a few months always.
Amy:Grace,
Peter:Grace, I have a question for you.
Amy:Go ahead, Peter.
Peter:So if a landowner thinks they have oak wilt on their property, how can they are there steps they can take to confirm it? And should they report it to someone? What do you suggest?
Grace:Yeah. Great questions. So the first thing to do, I guess I'll I can kind of go over some of the most typical symptoms because that can give you an idea of whether you can kind of rule out oak wilt or whether it's likely to be oak wilt. So the first one is that thing that I mentioned that it starts at the outside edges of the canopy. So one other common disease of oak trees is called bur oak blight.
Grace:That has kind of the opposite pattern of death where you'll start to see that wilting toward the inside of the canopy and the bottom, and it'll work its way up the tree. And then it it also only affects bur oaks. So if you see that kind of different pattern, that's a good sign that it's probably not oak wilt. Those trees will also come back the following year after losing their leaves, which is not true with oak wilt. So that's kind of the first thing to look for this top down or outside in-depth on the canopy.
Grace:There's also really distinctive patterns to the leaves when they have oak wilt. So similar, I guess, kind of to the canopy, the the bronzing or waterlogged look, that'll start at the edges of the leaf and then it'll work its way in toward the middle. And something that people who work on oak wilt will call it is at the end there'll just be a little patch of healthy looking leaf at the mid vein or at kind of the center of the leaf and sometimes we call those leaf islands or islands of green. So if you kind of see these leaves on the ground that have bronzed or had this weird discoloration and you see kind of that little circle or little clustered part of healthy looking leaf right along the mid vein, that's probably leaf island and that's another sign that it's probably oak wilt. And then the third thing, which is kind of how you could come to find these leaves, is after trees get oak wilt, they'll shed their leaves really quickly.
Grace:So basically you'll start, especially if this is on your land and you're seeing this tree every day, you might start to see those symptoms at the edge of the canopy and then it'll shed those leaves really quickly. And as it moves down the canopy, it'll be a similar pattern where they'll bronze kind of moving down the canopy and then quickly shed those leaves. So you can kind of walk around, pick up the leaves and look for those leaf islands. The problem with diagnosing oak wilt, it can be really difficult to diagnose even for professionals who've worked on it for a long time. And there's a lot of other things that can kind of mimic these symptoms.
Grace:So if you think you have oak wilt and because it's kind of expensive to treat, you probably want to confirm it in a lab before you start taking those measures to treat or manage it. And actually the University of Minnesota has a special clinic called the Plant Disease Clinic and you can submit a sample to them and they'll do a whole range of different tests. They basically are culturing fungus that they can find in the branch that you send in and grow it on a plate. And then they'll be able to confirm it within a laboratory with kind of their diagnostic tests, whether what you have is oak wilt or something else, or maybe there's multiple things happening at once, and they'll be able to kinda help you out with all of that.
Peter:Thanks. And then reporting, I've heard about a couple apps that I can use. Do you have any that you suggest?
Grace:Yeah. So the best apps to use in Minnesota at least are gonna be EDDMapS, so that's e d d maps or GLEDN, which is the Great Lakes Early Detection Network. So GLEDN. You can report it through either of those. If you have if you find something that might be oak wilt, and particularly if you've already confirmed that outside of the main areas where oak wilt already is, you're gonna wanna report that directly to the Minnesota DNR.
Grace:So you can find on their website, you can find the forest health specialist who's closest to you, and they'll be able to come out to your land and get you a diagnosis or look at your land. And they also just want to know for sure where it is, especially if it's kind of moving outside of those core areas.
Amy:So I have a follow-up question about your EDDMAPs or GLEDEN reporting. I'm familiar with those for reporting invasive species. So is this fungus considered an invasive species?
Grace:That's a great question, Amy. So we think of it as an invasive species, but we really haven't confirmed where it is. But it also it kind of behaves like an invasive species because we're seeing its range expanding within The United States in patterns that are kind of similar to other invasive species, basically.
Eli:How
Amy:does it spread?
Eli:Well, wait a minute, let's do that. But before we go there, I'm interested in so the inner sort of academic nerd in me is coming out so invasive and exotic. So invasive species take over an area. They can invade and block outgrowth of a lot of other species or whatever, or they move quickly across a new area. Exotic means not from here.
Eli:Right? So oak wilt is in a little bit sort of doing both of those. Its range is moving. And I think we should talk about where it is and where it's going. I know we'll get to that.
Eli:But also, you're saying it's exotic. It's not native to North America, at least we think so, right?
Grace:Yeah. And I guess this could be wrong. So I mean, we have a lot of invasive species experts in the room, but I mean, I kind of think of invasive as almost a subset of exotic, where there are a lot of exotic species that are not from a place, but not all of them meet the criteria for being considered invasive, which means that they have to be causing significant damage. Suppose we also have kind of a new term of native invasive species where a native species is causing damage that it historically hasn't. But yes, with oak wilt, it is both exotic, probably, and invasive because it's causing a lot of extensive damage in the woodlands that it is in.
Eli:Okay. And what areas is it in? Why don't you tell us about its distribution and where
Grace:is it going? So oak wilt kind of occupies the Central United States. So it's a big problem in Texas and kind of extending northward all the way up into Minnesota. There is some oak wilt as far east as New York, but it's not really like across the Eastern Seaboard, which is a bit of a different distribution. I think a lot of invasive species kind of come in from port areas like that.
Grace:With oak wilt, it's mostly still in it's the biggest problem in the Central States. And within Minnesota, it kind of generally is in the Southeast, but it hasn't extended super far into the Central Southern area of Minnesota. So it's mostly in those Western counties, sorry, Eastern, it's mostly in those Eastern counties, but kind of on the Southern side of the state. There's one little kind of finger of common oak wilt in Freeborn County in Southern Minnesota, and then it's kind of spreading northward and westward. So it's kind of what we think of as the leading edges.
Grace:So the areas where it's newest are Morrison County and Pine County, and those are kind of like a little finger as well. It's a bit of an odd shape, And I think in the show notes we have a link to the Minnesota DNR page, and that has a map there that has been just updated this year so you can really see where it's most, the most current estimates of where exactly it is and where it's common. And so on that map, you'll Repeat. Have Sorry, go ahead.
Eli:I was just gonna ask a really important question whether it would be appropriate to blame our neighbors in Wisconsin since most of the places that it is in Minnesota is right next to the Wisconsin Well,
Grace:believe it was first described in Wisconsin. So we can't necessarily blame them and I would not wanna do that a recording.
Peter:We can't rule it out.
Grace:But we can't it out.
Eli:Right. Exactly.
Amy:Is it following waterways in any way, like the Saint Croix Valley? I mean, do you think it's moving via those those channels?
Grace:Well, that's a that's an important question because that can that that can kind of get us into how it spreads. I it is not this is a a fungus. You know, a lot of fungi are able to survive without their host. So that's kind of we think of the spores basically and and kind of the cap and stem mushrooms that we think of. Those don't necessarily need to be on the host that they live on.
Grace:This is a fungus that very much needs to be on its host in order to survive. It needs living host tissue. And so it can be spread above ground by beetles, which shows us that the spores, at least for a short period of time, are able to survive, but it is not able to spread via waterways, via air, via really anything. Even the tools that they use to control it, there have been studies looking at whether the spores that are on those tools are at risk for spreading it, and they have not found any evidence that it's able to be spread in those ways. So I can't it does seem like it's kind of spreading through the Saint Croix River Valley just based on that map, but I don't think that there's any connection there just based on kind of there's not really a biologically relevant piece that would explain why it would be connected to that.
Grace:Would imagine it has more to do with kind of where it's coming from, where the oaks are potentially soil types and things like that. So oak wilt is able to spread via two mechanisms. So I already mentioned the one above ground. There are some sap feeding beetles. Once oak wilt creates what's called a spore mat on a tree, which is basically just a collection of spores, these beetles, which are native beetles, these beetles can come in.
Grace:They land on the spore mat because it smells super sweet. And then they're also drawn to fresh wounds on oak trees. And so if they go from a spore mat and then inadvertently carry spores to a fresh wound on an oak tree, then that can infect that healthy oak tree that they've landed on via that cut or wound that can infect that tree. But the much more common way that it spreads is via connected root systems. So oak trees have this amazing ability to form grafts with their neighboring oak trees with their roots.
Grace:And so that means that they're able to share nutrients and resources like water with their neighbors, but it also means that the spores that are inside of one oak tree are easily spread to their neighbors. And so that's why kind of another diagnostic thing for for figuring out if what you have on your land is oak wilt, if you're seeing some of those other patterns that I mentioned, is if it's kind of spreading in this radial pattern. We tend to see if there's a central oak tree that gets infected probably from that above ground spread. And then if no treatment happens, then that'll spread through the roots of that tree to any neighboring trees that that tree has grafted roots with.
Peter:So assuming I'm a landowner with few acres and maybe it's like oak dominated by oaks, and I've I I think I've got it. I went through the process, confirmed it. What are some of the steps that I can take to treat those trees? Do I, you know, cut them? What do I do?
Peter:How do I make sure that my neighbors don't get it or that it doesn't spread to the rest of my forest?
Grace:Yeah, that's a great question. So there's basically because of these kind of two mechanisms of spread, there's above ground and below ground, there's a couple of different things that you wanna do. So the first one is you and and it's important that this is chronologically first as well. The first thing that you wanna do is sever the roots between the infected trees, a buffer zone around them, and then the healthy trees on the other side. And if you go to that DNR page, or there's also a PDF linked with very thorough instructions for for how to manage it and kinda what your steps are.
Grace:If you look at either of those, those will help you kind of determine the buffer zone of how many healthy looking trees around the tree that is visibly infected, how many of those you need to include in your buffer. Basically you're going to take a tool around this defined buffer zone and you just slice through all of the roots around them. And that way any of the infected trees will no longer have grafts formed with the trees on the other side of that plow line. So most of the time people do this with a tool called a vibratory plow. That is basically like it has a big vibrating saw blade that gets stuck into the ground and then it's kind of dragged around this buffer of trees.
Grace:So it's important to do that first. You can also, because those can be hard to come by, they can be kind of expensive, what some people will do instead is rent a trencher from like Home Depot or another hardware store. You can often rent those. You wanna get ones with the longest blade you can find, usually that's five feet. Oh, it's either four or five feet.
Grace:I think maybe that it's supposed to be five, but what you can usually find is four, now that I'm thinking through it. But you want to get the biggest either way, you want to get the biggest trencher blade that you can find, and then you can do that yourself. It's a little bit more difficult. I think it's a little more unwieldy of a machine than a vibratory plow, but it's also more accessible. So you can do that first.
Grace:Then after that, the best thing for you to do is to fell all of the trees that are on the inside of that plow line. And so that is one of the reasons why it's really important to make sure that it's diagnosed oak wilt because it is a damaging treatment in that you have to sacrifice a lot of trees that look healthy on the inside to really be able to The stop reason why you want to cut those down is because trees form those formats which attract the beetles. When they form, they form those formats within a year of dying from oak wilt. And so after they've died, you want to cut them down and then either keep the wood under tarp or burn it or debark it or chip it, basically, so that then the the right moisture content isn't met for this format to be able to form.
Peter:Does that conform after I've Yes. A person has felled
Grace:the tree? Conform on wood after after it's been felled. It has to do there there are certain conditions that have to be met. Basically, has to it it has to do with the wood's moisture content. So sometimes based on the timing of when that tree died, it won't form.
Grace:They usually form on about half of the red oak species that die from oak wilt. So it's not a guarantee that it'll form a sporemat, but it's important for the sake of prevention so that nobody else has to go through this extensive treatment for you to treat that wood properly, because otherwise you're really kind of perpetuating the problem, even if you've solved it in that particular gap. There is one alternative for people who are unable to access a vibratory plow, and this is best done on small patches of oak wilts. If you have just like one or two, maybe three trees that are visibly infected, you can actually cut a girdle around their base, ideally a double girdle, and then apply herbicide to that. So I think what's usually used is Triclopyr, which is the active ingredient in Garlon.
Grace:And then that is thought to probably kill the root systems, although there's still, there's more research that needs to be done on that. And then it also, by girdling them, it causes the above ground wood to dry fast enough that it's not supposed to be able to form those formats. So that's another effective way to do it, but of course you have to be careful when you're girdling trees because then you're creating hazards. So that's something that's more accessible, like deep in your backwoods where no one's walking near it than if you're, like, next to a trail or it's next to your house or something.
Eli:So, Grace, just to repeat, so girdling means, you said, like, taking a chainsaw and cutting a couple inches into the, you know, under the bark into the growing wood of the Yes. Correct. Enough to sever the vessels that move water and nutrients up and down the trees. Yes. Exactly.
Eli:Right? So you're basically leaving a standing dead tree Mhmm. Which Peter loves. Right? Because Peter, birds love standing dead trees, right?
Eli:Good gap, good habitat, but maybe in this case
Peter:Absolutely. A range of different wildlife will utilize those standing snags, those cavity trees. We kind of want to retain them where we can, where they're not a hazard tree or have some kind of safety implications. But it sounds like here, know, as we girdle them, as we drop them, it's important to, you know, cover them or I've heard dry kilning them where you dry them out or burn them. These would not necessarily be the trees that you want to keep that wood around unless you're being very intentional in how you store it.
Peter:Additionally too, and perhaps Grace can comment on this. The last thing we'd wanna do is is move that wood around. So transporting that wood. And then is there, like, a seasonality of when to and when not to cut that
Grace:you could speak to? That's a great question. First of all, wanna reiterate, yes, absolutely, you don't wanna be moving that wood. And and honestly, not moving wood is a good idea in general all the time because many different invasive invasive species are spread on wood, and sometimes that happens before we've found them. So just generally speaking for the sake of our woods, it's best to burn firewood in the same county where it was collected.
Grace:Or if you're going to move firewood, that should be a certified firewood. It can be certified by the Minnesota Department of Agriculture that that's safe to be moved.
Eli:So buy it buy it where you burn it.
Grace:Buy it where you burn it.
Eli:Right? Is what they say.
Grace:Yeah. Absolutely. And then for the seasonality, the beetles that are able to spread this disease above ground are active between usually starting in mid April and moving through mid July. And so those are the times that you wanna absolutely make sure that there are no wounds on your oak trees if at all possible. So if you have any like routine pruning that you want to do, it's best to do that, the safest time to do that is in the winter, so when it's not the growing season at all.
Grace:There's minimal risk after late July or before April, But there is still some risk during those times. So the best time to do it is in like the dead of winter. If you do have to, you know, sometimes you'll have to take down a branch because of insurance reasons or because of a power line, etcetera, or sometimes nature creates wounds by, having windstorms. If a wound does occur on one of your oak trees during that window, so that's again, April through July. If a wound does occur, you can paint over it with any kind of water based paint and that's a 100% effective as long as the paint dries.
Grace:So you can use water based any kind of water based paint. There's special pruning paints that you can buy or you can use like a shellac or something like that. Yeah. I think there are
Eli:Grace, some good
Amy:is there anything that people who don't own woodlands or oak trees can do to help, you know, kinda stop the spread of this?
Grace:Well, don't move firewood.
Eli:Yeah. Every time I see a pickup truck going up and down 35 with firewood in the bed, I just cringe.
Grace:Oh, it kills me. Yeah. All the things won't.
Eli:Emerald ash borer, oak wilt.
Peter:That's just right.
Grace:Oh, just not.
Eli:Right.
Grace:Yeah. So I mean, that that would be a big thing. Another thing you can do is if you think that what you're seeing might be oak wilt in a natural area, you can report that via EDDMapS as well. So you can kind of keep an eye out for those symptoms that I described, the top down wilting, the leaf islands, the early season leaf drop. And you can report those with one of those apps as well, even if it's not your land.
Grace:I wouldn't recommend, know, I think the DNR has enough to do without getting a call from everyone who finds OQL, especially if you're in those areas. But if you see it outside of the core areas, and again, can see that on that map, or if you see it in those areas and you wanna report it with one of those apps, the that can be a good idea and can kinda help us keep tabs on where it is, where it's common, etcetera.
Peter:Well and does the DNR have some access to, and I think perhaps the soil and water conservation districts and maybe the NRCS, you know, there may be some cost share and technical assistance in your areas that maybe can help.
Grace:Yes, that's correct. Peter, I'm glad you brought that up. So you're going to want to that's mostly going to be available in kind of those leading edge areas. Probably in like Morrison and Pine Counties, there's now a tiny patch of oak wilt being common in Cass County. So kind of in those areas where oak wilt is present but kind of on the outside of where it's present, where it's spreading, those are the areas where you're going have the best chance of there being cost sharing measures from the DNR.
Grace:And that can make something like one of those vibratory plows that are expensive and hard to operate, that can make some of those things a little more accessible to someone who may otherwise not be able to. And you know, it'd be great if that could be offered to everyone, but with limited resources, it makes sense to kind of have those resources allocated to the places where we're most trying to kind of slow the spread of oak wilt.
Peter:Great. Thanks, Grace.
Eli:All right. So Grace, just to kind of reiterate, so the super important things that you want everyone to know, one, I think you said don't prune oaks from April through July. So if you need to prune your oaks, do it when they're dormant, do it in the late fall, do it in the winter. Don't take a risk. You don't want to be that new infection center for your whole neighborhood back 40, whatever.
Eli:So don't prune your oaks from April through July. Do not move firewood. Don't make me cringe as I'm driving up and down 35, which I do at least once a week between Cloquet and the Twin Cities. You mentioned the two different ways that it spreads. It can spread through root grafts, so underground, and then it's carried by those sap feeding beetles, right?
Grace:From tree
Eli:to tree they get spores on their back and then they fly around to feed on the next tree and move the fungus that way. We need to be watching not only for those expanding gaps moving out radially from one infected tree, but also new infection centers that happen from beetles that are flying. So it's an important disease. There are a lot of oaks in Minnesota, especially in Southern And Central Minnesota, but oak is well distributed around the state, much less of it way up north, but it's everywhere and it is something we need to watch for. Grace, you've gone through a lot of details.
Eli:What would you recommend for folks if they want to see pictures? I know we're going to have links in our show notes, but is our Oak Wilt page the place to go? Know DNR has got some good info. What would you recommend for
Grace:I folks to get more think either of those places would be a great place to go. The DNR's website has a lot of information. Our website does as well. On our website, we have a little current risk for pruning dial, I guess. It's not technically a dial, but if you visit our webpage which is z.umn.edu/oakwilt and that'll be linked in the show notes, if you visit that you can see today is the of pruning oak trees for the potential introduction of oak wilt.
Grace:And we change that through the season. So that's a good place where you can get information.
Eli:And Grace, it just so happens that I am looking at that page right now by a coincidence. So it's July and so we know it's high risk. And I'm looking at that page. It says current oak wilt risk is high. It says don't prune wound or fell oaks in counties affected by oak wilt.
Eli:So the link to that map you've mentioned is right there. So if folks are wondering that z.umn.edu/oakwilt, yeah, you've got great information there. There are pictures of trees with dying crowns. Yeah. There's pictures of those leaf the green islands or leaf islands that you mentioned.
Eli:Yeah. There's a ton of good stuff there.
Peter:Say side question for you, Grace.
Eli:We
Peter:have this window where we want to avoid pruning for the sake of oak wilt. Would you recommend the same just in general for a range of different tree species just to avoid, you know, other pests and pathogens from invading during this time of year?
Grace:I actually don't know how much wounding other trees adds to risk. Do other people like Eli, do you know? Is it generally Yeah. My understanding is that generally it's best not to prune at this time of year anyway, but I actually can't speak to that specifically for any other
Eli:Yeah. No, that's absolutely right. Yeah, you're on the right track. So I mean, you want to prune when trees are dormant. They're not moving nutrients up and down.
Eli:They have already translocated all those nutrients from their leaves back into the stem. And so when you cut off a small branch, hopefully it's a small branch most of the time you're pruning, tree is retaining more of those nutrients. And then when spring comes, it has those nutrients available to seal over the wound more quickly. So yeah, you really want to, if you can or to the extent you can, you want to avoid wounding trees or pruning trees in the summer during the growing season. There's just more around, more fungus flying around, more bugs flying around, more nutrients the trees are trying to grow.
Eli:They don't want to have to stop and fix a wound, but it's so it's far better to prune in the dormant season.
Amy:That old adage that you should prune when your saw is sharp is completely incorrect.
Eli:Well, your saw should be sharp when you're pruning, but that should not be your guide to when to prune. That's exactly right.
Grace:That question does remind me though, Peter, even independently of the other tree's health, felling trees near oak trees can still be a risk because of that same thing kind of with wind damage where you can create a wound inadvertently on an oak tree. So, know, if you if you do have to fell a tree and you have to do it in the in that window, it's best to it it's it's not a good idea still because if if it's in proximity to oaks because as it's falling, it could wound an oak and then that could invite an opening where one of those knitted dulid beetles or sap feeding beetles can come in and and drop those spores.
Peter:And that can happen almost immediately. Right? Isn't it very quick?
Grace:It has been documented in ten minutes. If you Wow. And it's a risk until I believe four days later. And so if you find a wound, if you see the wound happen and you can do it immediately, that's obviously best. But if there's a windstorm and the next morning you come out and you can see that there's an opening on that tree, it still is worthwhile to paint over it even if it's been more than ten minutes, at least until like four days later.
Grace:Because even if they they they can find it that quickly, which is why we wanna do it quickly, but we can still minimize the remaining risk by painting over it in that additional time period.
Amy:And those beetles are located in every stand of oaks?
Grace:The beetles are pretty well distributed, I believe, throughout Minnesota and even beyond. They're native beetles, and there are a few different species. And so I am not certain exactly what the extent is of all the different ones that theoretically could transmit oak wilt, but it's safe to assume that they are a risk in every county where oak wilt is in Minnesota.
Eli:Yeah. They're just, they're harmless little beetles, right? Not really their fault. They just happen to have oak wilt fungus on their backs unknowingly. Maybe it's like one of us having a cold and, and, sneezing.
Eli:I don't know. But, is Well, Grace, this has been great. We're getting close to the end of our time, but I really want to thank you for being here to help us kick off this new podcast. It's been a good conversation. All right.
Eli:Any closing questions for Grace before we go? Righty. Good. Well, Grace, this has been really fun. Amy and Peter, thanks for the conversation.
Eli:We'll be back soon enough. And welcome again to all of you to this new podcast. We're really glad to have you here. We're going to learn as we go. This will be an interesting little project for us to figure out how to produce something that people actually want to listen to.
Eli:And we'd love to hear from you. You can reach us at myminnesotahumn dot edu. Myminnesotahumn dot edu. We'd love to hear from you and you can share ideas if you have ideas for guests or topics or if you want to tell us how to do a better job, let us know. We'd love to hear.
Eli:Again, thanks Grace. We'll talk to you next time.
Grace:Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
Amy:Thanks Grace.
Peter:Take care everyone.