By Jennifer Viegas| Discovery Channel updated 1:11 p.m. CT, Wed., Feb. 10, 2010
Beetles are destroying ponderosa, pinyon, lodgepole pines and other trees important to the ecosystem. ... The beetles have their place in the ecosystem too, of course, but climate change and human activities have allowed beetles to take over more than they should.
To combat such infestations, scientists thought up the "nastiest, most offensive sounds" they could. The scientists then played these recordings near beetle-infested trees that they brought into a lab setting. The sounds disrupted tunneling, mating and reproduction for the beetles, making it harder for the insects to eat through the trees.
The project, dubbed "Beetle Mania," concluded that acoustic stress may disrupt the tenacious insects' feeding and even cause the beetles to kill each other, according to a presentation recently at the National Meeting of the Entomological Society of America.
Sounds cited as most destructive to the beetles, in ascending order, appear to have been:
- - recordings of Guns & Roses, & Queen
- - Rush Limbaugh
- - manipulated versions of the insects' own sounds.
Richard Hofstetter, an entomology professor at Northern Arizona University who worked on the project, told Discovery News that "the most annoying sound" his colleague, Reagan McGuire, "could think of was Rush Limbaugh or rock music."
McGuire started to pump the sounds of Limbaugh into portions of infested tree trunks brought into their lab, but Hofstetter said McGuire "could not bear listening to Limbaugh, so he ended up playing Rush backwards, which still kept the voice and intonation the same, but the words were meaningless." [just like when played forward?]