From Sally [Sarah G.] Thomason on Facebook yesterday, a beetle tunnel report from Montana:
(#1) ST: I’ve seen [bark] beetle galleries on logs before, but this log, which lies across a trail we [AZ: linguist ST and her philosopher husband Rich, plus their dog Yaskay] often walk on here in Montana, has a particularly exuberant and artistic bunch of galleries
Five things: the title of this posting; beetle galleries (of tunnels); bark beetles; gallery lexicography; beetle tracks (as we referred to them) on a family place out in the boonies of New Smithville PA.
My title. A play on the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood, and an homage to it. From Wikipedia:
“Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)”, otherwise known as simply “Norwegian Wood”, is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1965 album Rubber Soul. It was written mainly by John Lennon, with lyrical contributions from Paul McCartney, and credited to the Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership. Influenced by the introspective lyrics of Bob Dylan, the song is considered a milestone in the Beatles’ development as songwriters. The track features a sitar part, played by lead guitarist George Harrison, that marked the first appearance of the Indian string instrument on a Western rock recording.
Beetle galleries (of tunnels). From ST, a pointer to the Washington Trails Association website, “The Truth Behind Bug Trails”, posted by Rachel Wendling on 10/11/17 (crucial phrase boldfaced):
The gallery is carved into the tree’s phloem, or inner bark, by female beetles and their larvae. Some species of beetles carve a specific pattern, while others carve random grooves. The galleries are often beautiful but beetle attacks are deadly. Typically, beetles attack trees already weakened by disease, wind damage, fire (beetles can sense fire from afar) or other reasons, but attacks often spill over into healthy trees. A beetle attack destroys the tree’s ability to transport food and nutrients, killing the tree.
The female beetle bores a straight tunnel into the phloem, while the male follows. After mating, she lays her eggs. When the eggs hatch, the larvae bore their own tunnels to create cozy nests to spend the winter in while they metamorphose into pupae and finally, adults. When ready to leave the nest, they munch tiny escape holes in the tree, then flutter out to make their own way in beetle life, leaving behind the galleries of tunnels in the tree’s phloem, which are eventually exposed when the bark falls away.
So the galleries are of tunnels in the wood (tunnel ‘artificial underground passage’). Made by bark beetles.
Bark beetles. From Wikipedia:
A bark beetle is the common name for the subfamily of beetles Scolytinae. … Although the term “bark beetle” refers to the fact that many species feed in the inner bark (phloem) layer of trees, the subfamily also has many species with other lifestyles, including some that bore into wood, feed in fruit and seeds, or tunnel into herbaceous plants. Well-known species are members of the type genus Scolytus, namely the European elm bark beetle S. multistriatus and the large elm bark beetle S. scolytus, which like the American elm bark beetle Hylurgopinus rufipes, transmit Dutch elm disease fungi (Ophiostoma). The mountain pine beetle Dendroctonus ponderosae, southern pine beetle Dendroctonus frontalis, and their near relatives are major pests of conifer forests in North America.
(#2) Dendrocotonus ponderosae, the mountain pine beetle, tiny but destructve (Wikipedia image)A similarly aggressive species in Europe is the spruce ips Ips typographus. A tiny bark beetle, the coffee berry borer, Hypothenemus hampei, is a major pest on coffee plantations around the world.
Lexicography of gallery. In the coleopteran context, a metaphor based on an architectural sense. Not yet in the OED. But in NOAD:
noun gallery: … 3 [a — architectural] a long room or passage, typically one that is partly open at the side to form a portico or colonnade. [b — metaphorical] a horizontal underground passage, especially in a mine: long underground galleries of 3 km or more made it possible to mine under the sea.
And then Merriam-Webster online makes the further connection to passages created by animals:
noun gallery: … 3 a: a long and narrow passage, apartment, or corridor b: a subterranean passageway in a cave or military mining system; also : a working drift or level in mining c: an underground passage made by a mole or ant or a passage made in wood by an insect (such as a beetle)
Beetle tracks. The vocabulary of galleries and tunnels seems to be the customary usage in entomological quarters, but there’s a question of how people who’ve not been exposed to this usage talk about these phenomena. As it happens, I was well acquainted in childhood with the patterns of borings in wood made by bark beetles, from summers on a family place (owned by an aunt’s husband) that had once been a farm but was now roughing it in the wild (down a dirt road from a paved country road, way out in rural New Smithville PA, in Lehigh County, west of Allentown, near the border with Berks County), without utilities (instead: wood stoves, water pumped from a spring, kerosene lamps, an outhouse) but with stone walls 18 inches thick, and a lovely wooden porch on two sides of the house — whose railings were covered with a tracery of the borings made by bark beetles.
We had no names for the phenomena, though we knew about bark beetles. The image we fixed on for talking about the evidence of the beetles’ doings was that of a track ‘a mark or line of marks left by someone or something going through’. They were beetle tracks. A perfectly reasonable label; borings, traces, grooves, and other names would have been possible, but we settled on tracks. I have no idea if anyone else used the term, but it was ours.
(My first time at the farm — as we called it in deference to my uncle Herb, though he did eventually install most of the utilities and got the barn working again, for poultry, so it came closer to being a farm — I was anxious about the railings and the other wood on the porch: what if the beetles ate them away and all the wooden bits crumbled to dust? When I got back home, and had an encyclopedia and a big public library to look things up in, I learned that the beetles would have long ago given up on this no-longer-living wood as a source of food, so we were safe on the porch.)