Every news organization around the state is talking about the Seven Thousand Traps. There are now 7,000 sticky, purple bug traps hanging in ash trees around Wisconsin, courtesy of our state’s Agriculture Department. The traps are there to stop the emerald ash borer, who eats the succulent wood of the ash tree and uses special chemicals in its belly to convert the chewed pulp into a poisonous gas which it then expels, killing all humans within 10 miles [citation needed].

But seriously, I don’t want to make light of a blight because I really like ash trees. They’re pretty. And every autumn, they all drop all their leaves over the course of one day, so it looks like it’s raining magical golden leaves. So I’d rather not see all of our ash trees get bored into and destroyed by some shiny, green grasshopper-looking thing. (Or, more accurately, their good-for-nothing, tree-killing larvae.) I hope all these sticky traps do the trick because scientists say the ash-pocalypse is a-comin’.

Why did Mother Nature even make the Emerald Ash Borer?