Red Palm Weevil

• By the time the visible symptoms appear, with the central leaves drooping or the crown collapsed, the palm is usually already lost: the larvae have been at work inside it for months.
• One early-detection technique is to listen inside the trunk with acoustic sensors, because the sound of the larvae chewing is audible with the right equipment.
• It has transformed the townscape of many Mediterranean cities and forced the felling of century-old palms all along the Spanish coast.
• It reached Spain in 2005 and has killed tens of thousands of palms, above all Canary Island date palms and date palms, along the entire Mediterranean coast.
• The damage is invisible until it is irreversible: the larva feeds on the inside of the trunk and the heart of the palm, and by the time the crown begins to droop the tree can no longer be saved.
• A single palm can harbour hundreds of larvae at once.
• It spread through the trade in transplanted adult palms, which travelled from one country to another already infested.
• It is detected with traps baited with aggregation pheromone combined with plant bait, and also with acoustic methods: microphones that pick up the sound of the larvae gnawing inside the trunk.
• In the Canary Islands its arrival amounted to a plant-health emergency because of the risk to the Canary Island date palm, which is endemic and a symbol of the archipelago.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat & environment

Palms, especially Canary Island and date palms

Sources consulted: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhynchophorus_ferrugineus