If you’re at a city park in the Kakaʻako or Ala Moana areas on Oʻahu, you may see crews working on palm trees as part of a new effort to keep away the invasive coconut rhinoceros beetle.
The crews will be injecting about 800 trees with an insecticide so that they can serve as a barrier to protect the dense groves of palm trees in urban Honolulu.
“We estimate that about a half of our palm tree inventory, of nearly 8,000 palms across the island, is concentrated from Moanalua to the Ka Iwi Coast,” said Roxanne Adams, administrator of the Honolulu Division of Urban Forestry, in a statement. “So the goal is to create a barrier making it more difficult for the beetle to infiltrate into these dense groves.
Many of those trees are even more concentrated between Kakaʻako and Lēʻahi, or Diamond Head.
The trees on the list will be located at Kakaʻako Waterfront Park, the Kakaʻako Gateway Makai and Mauka parks, Kewalo Basin Park and Ala Moana Regional Park.
The trees will be injected with the Xytect insecticide, which is supposed to prevent CRB from infecting them.
While the beetle is considered widespread on Oʻahu, it’s less prevalent in urban Honolulu.
“It's significantly easier to control the spread of CRB in the urban jungle as opposed to more country areas. … In town, we've got much more development, much more concrete, a lot less area for CRB to proliferate,” said Nathan Serota, spokesperson for the Honolulu Department of Parks and Recreation.
The city is working with the state Department of Agriculture on the effort, which started this week. The city said the injections are effective, but can be cost-prohibitive and will require future applications.
It has tried various methods of slowing CRB, including installing netting on newly planted palm trees to trap the beetle, implementing new landscaping policies, using other chemical treatments, and even removing infected trees.
