While the impact has been enormous, Mangold said, the mountain pine beetle is a native insect that, along with fire, does play a role in the regeneration of lodgepole pines.
The pines have a hard cone that won’t open without a hot fire, he said. When the cones open, they dump out seed, creating a thick forest of trees of the same age. When the trees hit 80 to 90 years old, they weaken and become susceptible to the mountain pine beetle. The beetles kill the trees, creating more dry fuel for those fires, he said.
I have extensive experience with “Dendroctunus Ponderosa” or Mountain Pine Bark Beetle in Colorado where the fires of 2003 have caused tree losses to increase to nearly 2 million per year here. A natural forest renewal provided by the good Lord, Yellowstone is recovering from its fires of the late 1980s (one of my favorite places), and has suffered much of the same. The lesser beetle, the Pine Engaver or “Ips Pini” flies as much as 5 times a year while MPB flies once. With Yellowstone as a guage of what to do...nothing, I’d say we just need to live a while longer if it bugs you enough.