Angelina Sirianni pulled a wagon weighed down with purple loosestrife plants and the beetles that devour it.
Recently, after months of work, high schooler Angelina finally got to release the loosestrife beetles she raised. She hopes they will descend on invasive purple loosestrife plants at Nature at the Confluence in South Beloit.
This project is Angelina’s Girl Scout Gold Award — an 80-hour endeavor. Many projects are focused on sustainability. Angela's is no exception.
"After learning about invasive and native plants," Sirianni said, "I was like, 'huh, this really is a problem that a lot of people do nothing about.'"
Purple loosestrife is an invasive plant that grows most commonly in wetland areas. It’s tall and blooms a bright, "Barney the Dinosaur" purple in the summer. Angelina wanted to combat these purple plants she saw blanketing the nature center with one tiny insect that can take a bite out of the problem: Galerucella beetles, otherwise known as loosestrife beetles.
This project is one that the nature center’s executive director, Julie Uram, understood to be a perfect fit for Angelina.
"It was on my list of when a scout asks [for a project]," Uram said. "If somebody wants to really spearhead it. Obviously, I helped, but it felt like it made more sense for one person to really focus on and hopefully it will make a difference here."
Angelina collected purple loosestrife and a few beetles with permission from local natural areas. She grew the plants under mesh and allowed the beetles to multiply for months.
"It was really fun to watch them grow and just to see it," she said. "It was hard to believe that this project was really going to work until I saw the impact."
During her project presentation at the nature center, she described every step so the audience could replicate her process.
"I am not using any chemicals because it is safer to use beetles," Sirianni said during her presentation, "since they will not harm the other plants that are supposed to be there. And by doing this project, it's spreading the word and helping the project continue."
And then, she led the group outside for a ceremonial beetle release.
Purple loosestrife has been such a problem in the state that Illinois passed the Exotic Weed Act in 2005, banning the sale and distribution of purple loosestrife and nine other invasive plant species.
Sharon Yiesla is a plant expert with the Morton Arboretum. She said "invasive" is exactly the word to describe this particular plant.
“That's a word that I think the public doesn't always fully understand," Yiesla said. "When we look at something being truly invasive, we're looking at the fact that it is having some impact on an environment, a habitat, or the survival of native plants."
Yiesla explained that beetles can be more successful than other approaches like pesticides and manually removing them. One purple loosestrife plant can produce more than a million seeds in a year. Manually pulling them out could spread the seeds around.
“So [beetles are] not the whole answer," Yiesla said, "but they're an important part of it, because they're weakening the plant. They're keeping it from being as dense as it could be, as productive as it could be. And so that's a, it's a good tool in our toolbox to fight against this weed."
Back at the beetle release, the plants were already starting to poke their purple flowers out. Angelina wheeled her potted plants — covered in beetles — to some strong-looking loosestrife on the bank of the creek and pulled off the netting. The onlookers excitedly shouted as they watched the tiny orange bugs make their way out of the netting.
Invasive plants, to the untrained eye, might not look like threats to the ecosystem. But projects like Angelina’s can help to raise awareness and address the issues in our own backyards.
"It felt kind of like a dream, almost," Sirianni said. "I always want to do a big, invasive plant project, but I just never really knew where to start. And seeing all these people and some I didn't even know, come to this event and watch me release them, that was kind of surprising, because I wasn't really expecting them to follow me.”
Whether the purple blanket of flowers returns this fall will now be up to Angelina’s bugs.