Black fingers of death battle cheatgrass

RENO - At Skull Valley, they study the black fingers of death.

These scientists aren't mad, and this isn't a B-grade horror flick.

Rather, researchers with the U.S. Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station are closely examining a fungus that has potential to help control the spread of cheatgrass, an invading plant spreading across millions of acres of the Great Basin at alarming cost to its ecology.

The fungus' catchy moniker came from the tiny, hairlike filaments that emerge from cheatgrass seeds after it attacks.

"After it kills the seed it sticks these black things out that look like fingers," Susan Meyer, research ecologist, told the Reno Gazette-Journal.

"It goes into them and eats them alive, basically," Meyer said. "It looks like a horror movie. It really does."

It's the black fingers of death doing their thing.

Much of the work takes place at Skull Valley, an area about 100 miles west of Provo, Utah, that is overrun by a sea of cheatgrass. There - at a remote spot not far from an Army nerve gas incinerator - Meyer and colleagues are trying to find ways to kill the stuff.

Cheatgrass, native to the steppes of Eurasia, was introduced to America through contaminated seed in the 1890s. It was first found in Nevada in 1906 and now dominates roughly 20 million acres of the West, Meyer said.

Cheatgrass invades and dominates the landscape, taking over terrain where sagebrush and native grasses thrive naturally. It often dominates land charred by wildfire, and once established, the highly flammable grass is prone to fuel future fires in a damaging cycle.

Researchers first came across the black fingers of death about 20 years ago while conducting germination studies on cheatgrass, Meyer said. The naturally occurring fungus appeared highly aggressive toward cheatgrass, killing tens of thousands of seeds per square meter.

"We thought that if we helped it enough, maybe it could kill them all," Meyer said of what appeared to be a promising opportunity.

Anything that works would be welcome when it comes to the battle against cheatgrass, agreed Lee Turner, a habitat specialist with the Nevada Department of Wildlife. Turner is heading up a program started in 2010 to restore Nevada's range, with cheatgrass one of the primary problems at hand.

"If it's a tool we can use, we're going to use it," Turner said. "If we can find something that's going to attack cheatgrass, by gum we're going to use it."

As it turns out, the black fingers of death don't appear to be the ultimate weapon some might have hoped for.

While deadly at times, the fungus does not appear particularly effective in killing cheatgrass seeds when they are rapidly germinating in the fall, Meyer said. Instead, it concentrates only on those seeds that don't germinate, diminishing its potential. That means the fungus might be most useful when applied in conjunction with other treatments such as the application of herbicides or controlled burning that eliminate germinating seeds.

"It doesn't actually take out cheatgrass by itself. You have to do it with something else," Meyer said.

Another potential problem: The black fingers of death could also target seeds of the native grasses desirable to the landscape. That could make any increased distribution of the fungus by humans a potential problem.

Other possibilities exist.

Earlier studies focused on another fungus - head smut - that interfered with cheatgrass reproduction. And researchers are trying to determine what pathogens might be responsible for large-scale die-offs of cheatgrass in parts of the Great Basin .