Hashem planted Sechel in the Jew !
New York (VINNEWS/Rabbi Yair Hoffman) In the late 1800s, large parts of Eretz Yisroel were swamp. Mosquitoes bred in the standing water, and malaria killed settlers by the thousands. In some settlements, rachmana litzlan, the death rate was said to be close to ninety-five percent.
The Rothchild’s sprang into action. Eucalyptus trees were brought from Australia and planted across the wetlands. Their roots worked like pumps — one full-grown tree can pull close to seventy gallons of water out of the ground in a day. Along with other efforts, the eucalyptus helped dry the swamps, wiped out the mosquito breeding grounds, and helped end the malaria. For the next hundred years, the eucalyptus seemed unstoppable. It survived heat, drought, and poor soil, and it could be planted almost anywhere.
Then, in the early 2000s, foresters noticed something frightening. Young green leaves began sprouting strange blister-like bumps. At first there were just a few. Soon they covered whole trees. The leaves fell, the branches dried out, the bark cracked, and entire groves began to die.
The Invisible Enemy
The cause was a wasp called Ophelimus maskelli, no bigger than a grain of sugar. Like the eucalyptus, it came from Australia. One theory is that it arrived in the Land hidden inside imported lumber.
How does such a tiny creature bring down a towering tree? The female lands on a young leaf, pierces it, and lays an egg together with a mix of venom and proteins. The leaf’s own cells are hijacked. Instead of growing into flat leaf tissue, they multiply and wrap around the egg until they form a hard, woody capsule called a gall. The tree is tricked into building an armored bunker for its enemy’s larva — and then feeding that larva day and night. Thousands of galls on one tree act like tiny pumps draining it of water and energy. The tree becomes a factory for feeding its parasites while its own roots and branches starve
Chazal teach that Hashem did not create even one thing in His world for nothing (Shabbos 77b). That Gemara lists creatures that seem to be pure nuisance — the fly, the mosquito, the snail — and shows that each one is the cure for something else.
RABOS MACHSHAVOS
The first answer men tried was the usual one: poison. Crop-dusting planes flew pass after pass over the dying forests, soaking them in pesticide. It did not work. The poison killed insects all through the forest — honeybees, butterflies, native beetles — but the wasp larvae, sealed inside their woody bunkers, were untouched. The chemicals ran off the leaves and seeped into the soil.
Next came the hope that nature would fix itself. The forests were full of woodpeckers and native insects. Surely the birds would peck open the galls and eat the fat larvae inside. They did not. Woodpeckers would land on an infested branch, look over the strange bumps, and fly off. To the local wildlife, the galls did not look or smell like food. The invader was, in effect, invisible.
Finally came the chainsaws and bulldozers. Infested trees were cut down, piled into huge heaps, and burned, larvae and all. Smoke hung over the forests for weeks. But while crews cleared one area, the wind carried millions of newly hatched wasps tens and even hundreds of miles to fresh territory. Cutting and burning did not stop the pest. It sped up the loss of the forest.
Atzas Hashem Hi Sakum
At that point, someone asked the obvious question. The eucalyptus comes from Australia. The pest comes from Australia. So why are the eucalyptus forests of Australia still green and healthy?
The answer: in Australia, Hashem had placed alongside this wasp a second creature whose whole life is devoted to hunting it — a creature no one in Eretz Yisrael had thought to look for, because nothing like it existed in the Middle East. The pasuk says Hashem made all His works with chochmah. A lock and its key, created together and set down together on the far side of the world, is chochmah of the highest order.
The Search in Australia
A team of Israeli scientists, led by Dr. Zvi Mendel of the Volcani Center, traveled to Australia. From galled eucalyptus leaves collected in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, they found four species of parasitic wasps that hunt the pest. Two of them, Closterocerus chamaeleon and Stethynium ophelimi, were later released in Israel. Thousands of live wasps were shipped across the world in climate-controlled containers.
Releasing them straight into the forest was out of the question. Bringing in a foreign species has ended in disaster more than once in history. What if the newcomers ignored the pest and attacked Israel’s honeybees or rare butterflies instead? So the wasps were placed in sealed quarantine, with double airlocks and filtered air, and given a strict test. They were starved and offered larvae from dozens of native Israeli insects. The result was striking. The Australian wasp wanted one target and one target only — the very pest that was killing the eucalyptus.
The quarantine had a second purpose. Back home, the rescue wasp has enemies of its own — wasps that lay their eggs inside the larvae of other wasps. Had even one of these come along as a stowaway, it could have multiplied and wiped out the rescuers within a few years. Researchers checked generation after generation under the microscope to make sure the shipment was clean.
A Creature Built for Its Job
Consider what this rescue wasp can do, and ask whether random chance could plausibly produce it.
The forests cover many thousands of acres, and the pest larva is hidden inside a woody gall. How does a microscopic hunter find its target in an ocean of green? When the pest chews the tree from inside, the stressed tree releases certain chemicals into the air — a distress signal. The rescue wasp picks up that scent from far away and flies straight to it. Landing on the branch, it presses its antennae against the bark like a seismograph and feels the tiny vibrations of the pest’s jaws chewing inside the gall.
Then there is the bunker wall. The rescue wasp’s egg-laying tube is not just a tube. It is a reinforced biological drill. The female braces herself against the gall, bores through the hard wall, and lays her egg right on the pest larva inside. When the egg hatches, the new larva attaches to the host and eats it, matures inside the same gall, and then chews its way out to find its next victim.
There was still a numbers problem. The forests held billions of pests, and only a few thousand rescuers had passed quarantine. But this creature has one more feature. In emergencies, the females can reproduce without males, producing an army of daughters, each born with the same single-minded instinct. A few thousand wasps could become millions.
Researchers loaded eucalyptus branches with the wasps in the lab, placed the branches in tube-shaped incubators, and foresters hung the tubes from trees in the heart of the infested zones. The wasps hatched already in the forest and went to work.
Within a few seasons, the pest population had dropped by about ninety-five percent. Deformed branches fell away and were replaced by clean, straight, healthy growth. Two of the released species, Closterocerus chamaeleon and Stethynium ophelimi, spread throughout the Mediterranean and have proven to be excellent biological controls.
Unlike pesticide, which must be bought and sprayed every season, the rescuers settled in permanently. Today they act as a self-sustaining patrol. When the pest flares up in a distant grove, the trees send out their chemical alarm, the wasps converge, wipe out the outbreak, and then wait for the next one.
Eucalyptus blooms in the fall and deep into winter, when almost every other plant in the Land is dormant. For millions of honeybees, the flowering eucalyptus forest is the only winter food. Had the forests died, the bees would have starved over the winter — and in spring, when the citrus groves and avocado orchards bloomed, there would have been no one to pollinate them. Two of Israel’s most important farm exports could have collapsed. An entire food chain was saved by an insect barely bigger than a grain of sand.
The rescue was not for Eretz Yisrael alone. In 2006, galled eucalyptus leaves carrying the developing rescue wasp were shipped from Israel to Sicily. Within about two years it had spread across many Mediterranean countries, turning up in Algeria some 450 kilometers from the nearest release site in Sardinia and as far away as Andalusia in Spain. The cure that Hashem placed in Australia, and that was found through the distress of the Land of Israel, now protects forests across the Mediterranean world.
The story of the eucalyptus forests is a story of a creature the size of a poppy seed, of another creature designed with exquisite precision to hunt it, and of the Yad Hashem that placed both in the world for a purpose that would only become clear in the Land upon which “the eyes of Hashem your G-d are always upon it, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year” (Devarim 11:12).
The Torah itself records that Hashem used a wasp to fight for the Land. “And I will send the tzirah before you, and it shall drive out the Chivi, the Canaani, and the Chiti from before you” (Shemos 23:28; see also Devarim 7:20 and Yehoshua 24:12). Chazal in Sotah (36a) discuss how this creature worked against the enemies of Klal Yisrael. The hornet of Yehoshua’s day drove out those who would have destroyed the Land; the wasp of our day drove out a pest that was destroying its forests. Hashem, it seems, likes to remind us that the smallest of His creatures can do what all of man’s planes, chemicals, and bulldozers cannot. The Gemara in Gittin (56b) teaches the same lesson from the other direction: the mighty Titus, who destroyed the Beis HaMikdash, was brought down by a gnat.
The Midrash (Bereishis Rabbah 10:6) teaches that there is no blade of grass below that does not have a mazal above that strikes it and says, “Grow.” Every creature has its assignment. A wasp in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, was given its assignment long before anyone in Eretz Yisrael knew that it, or its prey, existed. The Rambam writes (Hilchos Yesodei HaTorah 2:2) that when a person contemplates Hashem’s great and wondrous works and sees in them His infinite wisdom, he immediately comes to love, praise, and glorify Him. The rescue of the eucalyptus forests is exactly such a contemplation.
“Mah rabu maasecha Hashem, kulam b’chochmah asisa — How many are Your works, Hashem; You made them all with wisdom” (Tehillim 104:24). Dovid HaMelech wrote those words about the cedars of Levanon, the springs in the valleys, and the creatures great and small that fill the earth.
The author can be reached at yairhoffman2@gmail.com.
