| Jeffrey Pettingill holds up a Diffuse Knapweed seed head and notes that it looks like just a few flowers, but in fact it is a combination of 20-30 different individual seeds. Each one of these can blow away and end up in the river. He notes that you can effectively kill this weed with a shovel by digging a couple of inches below the ground and pull it out and you are good to go. In a situation where you have thousands and millions of plants you can cause more disturbance than you create by trying to kill the weed. He notes that this is BLM property and one of the best things they have done is to release quite a few insects. Wade found one of these on a Diffuse Knapweed flower and Jeffrey holds it up to the camera. He explains that this insect will lay its eggs into the seed head and it will eat the seeds. You may see the resulting seed plume blowing around in the wind, but there will be no viable seed with it. The BLM has also released other insects that will eat down into the roots and bore them out, effectively killing the whole plant so they can't go through their life cycle. With these tools we are doing the best we can in this area by the South Fork of the Snake River.
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