Beach redbay trees in jeopardy

Among the live oak and palmetto, redbay trees usually don't get much notice. Until now.

"They're dying all up and down here," said Roy Baylor, pointing both ways along Arctic Avenue on Folly Beach.

"These trees saved our house during (Hurricane) Hugo," Kelly King said sadly as she looks up at the browned leaves of the big tree in her front yard a few streets back.

Laurel wilt disease has begun killing the redbays in the Lowcountry, biologists strongly suspect. Actually a laurel plant, the tree is one of the ubiquitous evergreens of the coast, the swaths of winter green beneath the live oaks along the barrier islands and inland. It can live more than 100 years and grow to a tree's girth. It looks like a skinny-leafed magnolia.

The redbay is a vital piece of the coastal ecosystem, providing late-fall fruit for threatened species of migrating birds and butterflies, cover for nesting, scenery, erosion control and seclusion for beach homes.

"We can't measure the impact of losses of things like these," said Billy McCord, a wildlife biologist with S.C. Department of Natural Resources. It's the kind of catastrophe that can dramatically change a coastal ecosystem, not to mention the greenscape that is a cachet of the Lowcountry beaches.

Testing is under way to confirm the disease, but it can't be much else. There's been one outbreak after another, moving up the coast. Nobody knows yet how to stop the disease, caused by a beetle-carried fungus. It's similar to Dutch elm disease, which has devastated elm trees in Europe and the United States.

"The prognosis is not good," McCord said. "It's another example of an invasive species gone wild."

A few months ago, the disease began destroying redbays on Folly Beach after turning up earlier on Kiawah Island to the south.

Not so oddly, the Folly Beach outbreak is confined — so far — to a few blocks around 11th Avenue in the island's center. The western end of the island — closest to Kiawah — hasn't been touched yet. That's even though the tiny ambrosia beetle carrying the fungus can't travel far. There's really only one other culprit.

"My guess is, people," McCord said. Somebody cut a beetle infested tree and somebody grabbed the dense, aromatic wood because it burned so well and long. With the log setting in a yard, the beetles came out.

That's no small problem at a destination beach, where vacationers can carry home the fungus. Cold won't stop it, and widespread plants such as sassafras are vulnerable, too.

Like any number of invasive species, the fungus came from Asia, probably in a shipment. It turned up in Savannah in 2002. In Asia, laurel plants have developed a resistance to it, unlike American plants. The fungus has already spread south into Florida, where it threatens the avocado crop. Agriculture researchers are frantically searching for a way to stop it.

"It's much worse ecologically in that it's getting into native plants," McCord said. The disease has raked Hunting Island near Beaufort, taking out an entire understory on a fragile barrier island already threatened by erosion.

"If you went to Hunting Island now, you would be appalled," McCord said.

Reach Bo Petersen at 745-5852 or bpetersen@postandcourier.com.