By Alice Rossignol and Rachael Gleason
Editor’s note: Great Lakes SmackDown! Terrestrial Terror is an on going Great Lakes Echo series.
Last week The Green Menace and The Beast faced off in the first match of the Terrestrial Terror Final Four.
So will it be the boar or the borer?
In the polls, 75 percent of readers chose swine over the green-plated insect. In the brackets, 37 percent chose the insect over the swine. The swine pulled in 28 percent of the votes while the rest of the bracketeers chose already fallen competitors.
It came down to the wire but the Echo judges went with …
The Emerald Ash Borer!
The feral swine used its menacing fighting skills across the Great Lakes region, but it just wasn’t enough. The mysterious and lethal insect was too much.
“[The emerald ash borer] is really hard to detect,” said Andrea Diss-Torrance, gypsy moth and invasive forest insect program coordinator for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
The feral swine population is less pervasive and is mostly found in Michigan while the borer ravages trees across the Great Lakes region.
“The insect hasn’t found an ash tree that it doesn’t like,” Diss-Torrance said.
But Michelle Rosen, a laboratory technician with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources disagrees with Echo on this one.
Rosen says the swine’s reputation as an aggressive killer of native plants and innocent fawns makes it the top contender.
“I think the feral swine wins it all,” she said.
But in Echo’s view, the feral pig is a bit like Virginia Commonwealth University: Nice run but can’t advance to the final SmackDown!
We’re moving the emerald ash borer on to the last round of Terrestrial Terror.