Taking care of the environment.

The Municipality of Mazraat Al Toufah would like to wish everyone a Happy Easter! Jesus Has Risen! Wishing all of you good health and happiness.

The Municipality continues to work on preserving its beautiful pine forest that surrounds the town. It had asked the Lebanese Army command to provide them with a helicopter to use in spraying the forest with lethal mixes of insecticides in order to minimize the manifestation of the Pine Processionary Caterpillars (Doudat Al Sandal) that has remarkably increased in the last few years.

On April 21st the helicopter that the Lebanese Military provided, came and sprayed the forest as you can see in the video below. The Agriculture Ministry provided and mixed the insecticides chemicals.

The Pine Processionary Caterpillar (Thaumetopoea pityocampa) is known as ‘Doudat Al Sandal’ in Arabic. During late winter through early spring they will be coming out of the trees and forming eye-catching snakelike lines as they navigate the ground searching for soft soil to burrow into. They will not be far from a pine tree, but that does not mean that you will only see them in large pine woods. They are just as likely to be found in urbanizations and road side plantings wherever pine trees are present.

There are several stages within their lifecycle but they are only dangerous to people during the caterpillar phase. In the adult phase they are a simple and unremarkable, short lived moth which emerges in the summer and flies at night. The male moth is attracted to the female moth by pheromones that she emits. They will mate and a single female can then lay up to 300 tiny eggs which she attaches in a mass to a pine needle. Around one month later these eggs hatch into small caterpillars.

These social caterpillars living in family communities eat pine needles by night and sleep in silk nests by day. They build these white silky nests on the tip of a pine branch as white cotton or ‘candy floss’ like structures and a single pine tree may have many. If there are few or more in the top of a tree they can easily strip the leaves with their nightly foraging, possibly clearing all greenery off some branches and in many cases damaging the tree badly. By feeding under the cover of darkness they avoid attack by birds and predatory wasps. At nightfall the caterpillars leave their communal nest in search of food. There is no single entrance hole, they simply push through the silk layers and once onto a branch they will leave a scent trail to help themselves find their way back before the morning light arrives.

From January to April the caterpillars leaves the nest in preparation for the next part of their lifecycle. And it is this point when most people come into contact with them, sometimes with very painful consequences. The colony follows a leader, nose to tail, in a long procession. These processions can vary in length; depending on how many have survived and whether they have been disturbed. 60 or so caterpillars each about 4cm long in a chain can be an impressive sight and if seen along a road may be mistaken for a snake. They may travel a distance of 30 or so meters to find soft soil to burrow into.

Once underground they change into pupae and during this part of their lives they look nothing like a caterpillar at all. Now they are covered in a tubular brown protective casing and they will lay dormant until the summer months. They have stored nutrients in their bodies on which they will survive the pupal stage of development. If the weather conditions are not favorable, they may remain underground until the following year. This is why some years seem to have many more visible nests than others; it may literally be because two years of moths (this years and last years) emerged at the same time.

And so on to the dangers involved, the best advice is to avoid these innocent looking creatures at all costs. The caterpillars are covered in tiny barbed hairs which are their defense mechanism. These hairs are often being shed and so can be airborne around infested pine trees, on the branches where they have traveled and also left in the line of the migrating procession.

When humans come into contact with these hairs, they can cause reactions ranging from mild inflammation and irritation to severe anaphylactic shock. The worst problems occur if you make contact with the caterpillar directly and ingest the hairs, either by picking it up, stepping on it or moving them in some manner. Once on your skin a rash soon forms which can be incredibly itchy. Medical advice should be sought if you are unfortunate enough to experience this. The rash can be painful, very itchy and lasts for as much as three weeks.

These defoliating pests, which can attack all types of pine trees, are found in warmer parts of Southern Europe, North Africa and across to the Near East. Their numbers have increased partly due to large plantations of pine trees in the Mediterranean areas. This facilitates their ability to multiply successfully. Milder winters, as have been occurring recently, are allowing these insects to expand into new areas, both into more northern latitudes and higher elevations.

A form of control that is regularly used in Lebanon is the random aerial spraying of pine forests with lethal mixes of insecticides as a fixative to stick the liquid to the pine needles, or cut down the nests and burn them.

Mazraat Al Toufah Municipality would like to send a special thanks to our Lebanese Army Forces, to the Agriculture Ministry and to everyone that helped in making this project possible. The Municipality is devoted in keeping its people and the environment healthy, help us in doing so.

Thanks.