The Agriculture Department banned untreated packaging from entering the United States last year. But officials still have to fight the beetles that already arrived and their offspring. Because pesticides are powerless against the beetles, the only way to stop their spread is to uproot infested trees and burn the wood. Most of the trees would die anyway from the holes bored in their trunks. The voracious beetles, usually between an inch and two inches long, are coal black with white spots and long antennae.
Females chew through bark to lay their eggs.
When the larvae hatch, they feed inside the tree for more than a year. Eventually they tunnel out, boring dime-sized holes in the trunks, and then restart the cycle. The damage is almost always fatal. Import hubs are most at risk. In Chicago, the infestation's epicenter was the backyard of a hardware company that received goods from China.