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Cryphonectria parasitica is a parasitic fungus of chestnut trees. This disease came to be known as chestnut blight. Naturally found in South East Asia, accidental introductions led to invasive populations of C. parasitica in North America and Europe. In the first half of the 20th century, the fungal disease had a devastating economic and social ...
The American chestnut (Castanea dentata) is a large, fast-growing deciduous tree of the beech family native to eastern North America. [3] As is true of all species in the genus Castanea, the American chestnut produces burred fruit with edible nuts. The American chestnut was once one of the most important forest trees throughout its range, [4][5 ...
The American chestnut trees that provided much of the mast on which the passenger pigeon fed was itself almost driven to extinction by an imported Asian fungus (chestnut blight) around 1905. As many as thirty billion trees are thought to have died as a result in the following decades, but this did not affect the passenger pigeon, which was ...
Meyer is also responsible for collecting specimens in China that showed that the fungus now known as Cryphonectria parasitica, responsible for the Chestnut blight disease first observed in the Bronx Zoo in 1904 and that had started killing American chestnut trees, was present on Chinese trees, confirming suspicions that it had originated from ...
“He is the researcher botanist who confirmed that the chestnut blight that killed the American chestnut trees starting in the 1920s in the eastern U.S. forests came from Chinese chestnut trees.
The American chestnut tree used to grow throughout the eastern U.S., but was devastated by a blight in the early 20th century.
By 1940, more than 3.5 billion American chestnut trees succumbed to the disease caused by a fungus, according to the Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
The chestnut blight was introduced in the late 19th century with the Japanese chestnut and decimated the once-widespread American chestnut tree. [9] Native un-modified trees are killed from the ground up by the blight, and only the root system survives.