DICKINSON, N.D. - On a pristine morning in the grassy fields skirting Dickinson, a gathering of families patrolled a pasture, sweeping nets across the knee-high forests at their feet.
They were fishing for flea beetles, the natural nemesis of the ever-present irritant known as leafy spurge.
"This is old hat," Travis Jepson, weed officer for Stark County, said as he oversaw the collection of flea beetles, brought steadily by the netful by an array of farmers and ranchers. "Everyone will come out, they'll sweep the field together, then we'll put them all together and divide them into bags and distribute them evenly among the landowners who did the work." In this way the community comes together toward a common good-according to Stark County Commissioner Jay Elkin, who was found sweeping up his own collection of the helpful insects.
"You couldn't ask for a better day to do this," he said. "It's everybody working together and today you really do see that, everybody working for one common interest-all of us are going to go home with a few bags of beetles."
Elkin is retired from farming, but he still likes to help out some of the farmers who rent his land, and he said he could remember when the flea beetles were far less readily available.
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"I remember maybe 20 years ago, we were buying these and it wasn't uncommon to spend $1,000," he said. "It's a blessing that we now have a weed department being aggressive about this. It's great."
Leafy spurge is a weed native to Europe that took root in North Dakota and has been a thorn in the side of farmers and ranchers for decades, Elkin said. Flea beetles are a biological control, a helpful part of any balanced approach to eliminating the pestilent plant. The beetles are captured in their adult form, but it is actually their young, the larvae, that kill the spurge. Their eggs are laid in the roots of the plant, and when they hatch, the insect young feast upon the roots of the spurge, killing it from the ground up.
The beetles are not native to North Dakota-they have been imported from their native Europe as well, but they've been residents of Stark County for some time now, since around the 1990s Jepson estimated. They live all over Stark County-but according to Jepson, they are not a risk for becoming a hazard to the local ecosystem like the spurge has been.
"The only way you could ever release a biocontrol agent in America is host specific," he said. "They go through all of the quarantine process to make sure those bio-control agents are host specific and that's the only things that will target."
