As if to mock our attempts to keep these foreign creatures from entering our country on nursery stock, a second species, the balsam woolly adelgid (Adelges piceae), has all but eliminated the Fraser fir (Abies fraseri) from the high altitudes of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (Amman & Speers 1965). This insect was brought to New England from Europe in 1900 and then was moved on nursery firs to North Carolina in the 1930s. Because Fraser firs are endemic to the Smokies (found nowhere else in the world), their loss from the area is equivalent to their extinction).
