Target acquired.

In one of the best-titled news articles of the week, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has leaked covert information about a black-ops mission to be undertaken in Saukville, Wisconsin later this month. The up-until-now-secret mission's objective? To find and eradicate the six-legged, tree-killing threat known as Codename: Agrilus planipennis or, more commonly, the emerald ash borer.

A group of scientists, led by UW-Madison entomologist Ken Raffa, has been working hard to prepare a ragtag unit of stingless, Chinese wasps, the EAB's natural enemy, for the operation. The first wave of wasps will work to infiltrate (and I do mean infiltrate) and destroy emerald ash borers in their larval stage and the second, slated to be deployed later this year, will bat clean-up by working to destroy eggs laid by the larvae who survive the first wasp assault. The hope is that this mission, which has already been undertaken in nine other states, will serve as a starting point for saving the 700 million ash trees throughout Wisconsin, several million of which have already fallen to the EAB menace.

Of course, the wasps that scientists are looking to release are themselves an invasive species, so there's a chance that this whole enemy of my enemy is my friend thing could go as well as it did when Asian beetles were reintroduced to Wisconsin in the 80s to control the pecan aphids population. The Journal Sentinel articles ends, however, with a note of reassurance when it says that:

In a statement issued by the DNR on Thursday, UW's Raffa said that "these wasps have undergone intense scrutiny by the USDA to safeguard harm against native species."

JSOnline 5-6-11

Apparently, it will take up to five years to figure out if the wasps have had any significant success with stopping the EABs. Still, that's a shorter amount of time than it took to complete this week's other big black-ops mission.