A lethal fungus making its way to Missouri could put a federally endangered plant in the state at further risk.
The pondberry is a shrub that grows in low, wet areas. In Missouri, it is found exclusively in the Ripley County region in the Ozarks, said Susan Farrington, a natural history biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation.
Farrington said the plant already struggles in the wild because of the way it reproduces and the loss of its wetland habitats.
Over 20 years ago, laurel wilt disease was found in Georgia. Since then, it has crept into some of Missouri's bordering states. Farrington said that a non-native beetle carries the fungus that causes the disease, and that it's only a matter of time before it gets to Missouri. When it does, she said it could affect the ecosystem, including the pondberry.
"It's knocking on our door," Farrington said. "It's over in Tennessee and even up as far north as Little Rock, Arkansas. So it's very close to us, but has not yet reached us, but when it does … that could be a serious threat."
The laurel family, which includes the spicebush, sassafras and pondberry, is particularly at risk.
Laurel wilt attacks these plants by clogging their water-conducting cells until they die.
Farrington said that the shrub could play a role in the environment that we don't even know, and that the loss could be devastating.
"We never really know how everything fits into the bigger picture," Farrington said. "We don't know all the importance of every single plant and every single organism in our environment, but it's important to try to preserve all the pieces and not let them disappear because we don't understand how everything interacts."
Rebecca Sucher, director of living collections and conservation horticulture at the Missouri Botanical Garden, said the garden has been working on the shrub since 1985. She said that the most recent collections are from 2023, and that the end goal is to reintroduce them to the wild. But she said it's not easy.
"This kind of work has a lot of different steps along the way, and sometimes it's not a straight line, and sometimes it can take a lot of time," Sucher said. "It's not going to happen quickly or easily, and so we really try to focus on one step at a time."
She said the plant is dioecious, which means each plant is either male or female. To make a seed, the male and female plants have to be in the same area, which Sucher said is becoming more difficult with habitat fragmentation.
"These habitats are kind of rare, and they're becoming increasingly rare because those habitats are kind of disappearing," Sucher said. "Because forests are being cut for timber or they're being converted to agriculture, so we're seeing more and more fragmentation."
Robbie Doerhoff , MDC forest entomologist, said any loss of forest biodiversity is devastating.
She said that laurel wilt could potentially cause the loss not just of the pondberry, but of Missouri's entire laurel family.
Right now, Doerhoff said there isn't a way to lessen the damage caused by laurel wilt.
"What research has been done does not give us hope that there's any way we can mitigate it on the forest level, and we haven't heard anything if there's any kind of resistance out there," Doerhoff said.
She said that one way to prevent the spread of laurel wilt is not to move firewood across state lines. This lessens the risk of transferring insects and diseases.
Symptoms of laurel wilt can include wilting leaves that turn reddish-brown. Other signs of the disease include small ambrosia beetle exit holes in bark.
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