How do we understand and start to deal with a blight, and chase it down and understand it? Did we have to wait until 1989 to have the tools and the knowledge to do that? Or were we just completely lost at the time? Like, how does something so small that we barely understand do that, and then how do we get to here?

That's a great question, because I think that chestnut blight was really the example that expanded people's understanding of that, at least as far as an introduced pathogen that affects trees.

That was the first one we had seen that really wiped through and made such a huge impactful difference, dis- yeah, difference to ecosystems.

And it was this confluence of, yeah, global shipping and trade and importation of ornamental trees, but also our understanding of the biology and the, the fact that microbes are causing these diseases.

People realized fairly early on as they were seeing these trees die, that it was caused by a fungus.

They could grow this thing in the lab and knew that it caused the disease.

And so the first, first efforts that were made to control it were spray something on the tree that kills fungi.

Mm.