Can a virus or bacteria kill off a whole species of plants?


In Britain a few years ago, the species of tree called the Elm tree suffered attack by a bacterial species which caused the disease known as 'Dutch elm disease'.

The trees gradually died and it was thought there were no more left alive, but some live trees of the species were found to have survived and there were also uninfected trees in another country.
The same thing happened in Britain at the time of the disease called the plague (around the 1600s) when many died from this disease. Everyone was in danger, but eventually the disease died down and in modern times it is almost unknown.
It is a paradox that such bacteria (or even parasitic plants) seem to kill off their food source, or their host, so it seems that if the host to parasites is small in number they could be wiped out, together with the parasite and a bacterial species could wipe out their victim species if there were already very few left.

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