The cause of bark stripping of young plantation trees
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OPINION PAPER
The cause of bark stripping of young plantation trees T. C. R. White
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Received: 17 June 2019 / Accepted: 24 September 2019 # INRA and Springer-Verlag France SAS, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract & Key message Herbivorous mammals, from small voles to large ungulates, strip and eat the bark of young plantation trees. They do this most frequently at times when sources of protein food that can support their reproduction and lactation are in short supply. Furthermore, they preferentially attack—often repeatedly—trees that have experienced some form of environmental stress, leaving neighbouring trees untouched. Such stressed trees carry higher levels of amino acids in their phloem. These facts, coupled with the similarly timed and selective harvesting of bark phloem by some Australia marsupials and Northern Hemisphere woodpeckers indicate that it is the trees’ protein-enriched phloem that the bark strippers are seeking. Keywords Amino acids . Cambium feeders . Drought . Environmental stress . Marsupial gliders . Nitrogen nutrition . Woodpeckers
Foresters all over the world are, from time to time, plagued by the stripping of bark from young plantation trees of a variety of both broadleaf and conifer species. The damage inflicted can vary from minor scarring through serious deformation of the trunk to death of the tree. The stripping is done by a diverse range of herbivorous mammals from large ruminants to small rodents, and occasionally by birds. Descriptions, discussions and reviews of this behaviour are readily available in the literature (Andreev 1988; Baxter and Hansson 2001; Gill 1992a, b; Klich 2017; Mansson and Jarnemo 2013; Motta 1996; Silcock 2018), and it is not the purpose of this short communication to add to this. Rather it presents a hypothesis based on evidence from studies of different but related bark feeding behaviours that reveal the likely common cause for this stripping behaviour. The stripping happens mostly in late winter and early spring, when the sap flow of the trees is increasing and when the animals are most likely to be short of sufficient protein food to support spring reproduction and lactation (Andreev 1988; Beeson 1989; Bucyanayandi et al. 1992; Hansson Handling Editor: Aurélien Sallé * T. C. R. White [email protected] 1
School of Agriculture Food and Wine, Waite Agricultural Research Institute, The University of Adelaide, Glen Osmond South Australia 5064 Australia
1986; Hornfeldt et al. 1986). Nor is this behaviour a random process. Certain trees are selected—often repeatedly—while others are left untouched (Mansson and Jarnemo 2013; Welch et al. 1987). Selected trees tend to be faster growing ones with thicker cambium and when the flow of their phloem sap is at a peak. But in addition, it is trees growing on poor soils or other stressful sites such as sun-exposed aspects or those stressed by ground fire or drought (Brockley and Elmes 1987; Camperio Ciani et al. 2001; Mori et al. 2015; Nichols et al. 2016), and trees that have been fertilized with nitroge
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