The European spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus), also called the eight-toothed spruce bark beetle, is a species of beetle in the weevil subfamily Scolytinae, the bark beetles, and is found in Europe, Asia Minor and east to China, Japan, and Korea. As it moves from tree to tree, it brings wood-rotting fungi with it, destroying the commercial value of the timber. It creates branching galleries under the bark (in the phloem), weakening the tree; serious and prolonged infestations can create enough galleries to girdle and so kill the tree. It is a serious pest of Norway spruce, a major commercial forestry tree in Europe, but also affects pines, firs, and larches.
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European spruce bark beetle in the context of Picea
A spruce is a tree of the genus Picea, a genus of some 37 species of coniferous evergreen trees in the family Pinaceae, found in the northern temperate and boreal (taiga) regions of the Northern Hemisphere. Picea is treated either in the subfamily Pinoideae, or the sole genus in its own subfamily Piceoideae.
Spruces can be distinguished from other genera of the family Pinaceae by their needles (leaves), which are four-sided and attached singly to small persistent peg-like structures (pulvini) on the twigs. The needles are shed when 4–10 years old, leaving the twigs rough with the retained pegs. Pests of spruce forestry include green spruce aphid, eastern spruce budworm, European spruce bark beetle, and great spruce bark beetle.