LOS ANGELES TIMES - The goldspotted oak borer has spread across Southern California since its discovery in 2008 in San Diego County, where it has slaughtered more than 80,000 trees.
Joelene Tamm, a graduate student with UC Riverside’s entomology department who studies the goldspotted oak borer, is concerned with slowing its march north into the Sierra Nevada, where the trees are already contending with the Mediterranean oak borer, another pernicious beetle, and sudden oak death, a disease caused by a microscopic pathogen.