Date Published: 07/06/2021
ARCHIVED - Red palm weevil infestation detected in Plaza de España in Águilas
ARCHIVED ARTICLE The palm trees in Plaza de España, the Port of Águilas and Plaza Antonio Cortijos are being given additional emergency treatment against this invasive pest
The Red Palm Weevil or Picudo Rojo, has been gradually eating its way through thousands of palm trees all along the Spanish coast during the last few years and although multiple options have been trialled, there is still no one product cheaply available for consumers to buy with which private palm trees can be protected, hence their relentless spread.
Municipal councils have larger resources than most private garden owners, and carry out a continuous cycle of preventative spraying/dusting or injecting, but from time to time trees with severe infestations are found and must be removed for safety reasons.
This was the case in Águilas last Tuesday (June 1), where park maintenance employees found that one of the palm trees in the central Plaza de España in Águilas was infested with red palm weevils, or Picudo rojo in Spanish. The tree has since been removed and the area has been cordoned off to enable municipal services to carry out a detailed examination of other trees in the plaza, one of the principal gathering places in the municipality.
The infected palm tree in Plaza de España had to be removed immediately as it represented a danger to pedestrians, as trees with weevil infestations normally end up hollow inside, making them likely to fall over.
The red palm weevil is a species of snout beetle which is particularly harmful to palm trees, as their larvae excavate large holes inside the trunks, weakening these trees and eventually killing them. These beetles are quite large, between two and five centimetres long, and are easily recognizable thanks to their musty red colour, but it is notoriously difficult to detect their presence inside a tree and it often only becomes apparent that the tree is infested when it is too late to save it.
From Friday (June 4) to Monday (June 7), the rest of the palm trees in Plaza España have undergone additional palm weevil treatment to try and prevent further transmission between the trees; palm weevil are able to fly up to one kilometre at a time.
The palm trees located in the Port have also been treated and those in Plaza Antonio Cortijos will be receiving the same red weevil treatment in the next few days.
Red palm weevils (rhynchophorus ferrugineus) are originally from tropical Asia and reached the Mediterranean area of Europe in the 1980’s, brought over in trees from Egypt and destined for the numerous golf resorts springing up at the time. They were first detected in Spain in 1994 and have been infecting palm trees in most parts of the country since then.