An adventive population of the exotic parasitoid wasp, Trissolcus japonicus (Ashmead) (Hymenoptera: Scelionidae), discovered in Michigan in 2018, is a promising biological control agent of the invasive Halyomorpha halys (Stål) (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae). Following its discovery, field releases of Tr. japonicus were conducted over 2 yr in southern Michigan, to test how release size or release frequency impacts establishment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMale Cydia pomonella (L.) (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae) dispersion has largely been studied in nonmating disrupted orchards due to synthetic pheromone interference with capture in monitoring traps. Little is known about female dispersion.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFungicides are commonly applied to prevent diseases in eastern North American cherry orchards at the same time that honey bees (Apis mellifera L. (Hymenoptera: Apidae)) are rented for pollination services. Fungicide exposure in honey bees can cause negative health effects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Invasive species threaten the productivity and stability of natural and managed ecosystems. Predicting the spread of invaders, which can aid in early mitigation efforts, is a major challenge, especially in the face of climate change. While ecological niche models are effective tools to assess habitat suitability for invaders, such models have rarely been created for invasive pest species with rapidly expanding ranges.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDrosophila suzukii (Matsumura, 1931) (Diptera: Drosophilidae) is a vinegar fly native to East Asia that has rapidly expanded its range to become a pest of sweet cherry (Prunus avium, L. 1753 [Rosales: Rosaceae]) and tart cherry (P. cerasus, L.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSeventy five percent of the world's food crops benefit from insect pollination. Hence, there has been increased interest in how global change drivers impact this critical ecosystem service. Because standardized data on crop pollination are rarely available, we are limited in our capacity to understand the variation in pollination benefits to crop yield, as well as to anticipate changes in this service, develop predictions, and inform management actions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDrosophila suzukii (Matsumura) (Diptera: Drosophilidae) also known as spotted-wing drosophila (SWD), is a pest native to Southeast Asia. In the last few decades, the pest has expanded its range to affect all major European and American fruit production regions. SWD is a highly adaptive insect that is able to disperse, survive, and flourish under a range of environmental conditions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground odors produced by plants in the environment can interfere with the response of insects to a point-releasing attractant, especially when their compositions overlap. In this study, a series of binary choice tests was conducted in a wind tunnel to investigate whether background odors emitted from cherry, blueberry, blackberry, or raspberry fruits would affect the level of Drosophila suzukii (Matsumura) attraction to its symbiotic yeast, Hanseniaspora uvarum (Niehaus) (Saccharomycetales: Saccharomycetaceae). Whether an increase in the intensity of background odors would affect the attractiveness of H.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSupporting ecosystem services and conserving biodiversity may be compatible goals, but there is concern that service-focused interventions mostly benefit a few common species. We use a spatially replicated, multiyear experiment in four agricultural settings to test if enhancing habitat adjacent to crops increases wild bee diversity and abundance on and off crops. We found that enhanced field edges harbored more taxonomically and functionally abundant, diverse, and compositionally different bee communities compared to control edges.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHalyomorpha halys (Stål) (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae), the brown marmorated stink bug, is an invasive polyphagous insect that can cause serious economic injury to specialty and row crops in the United States and globally. To date, H. halys has been managed with repeated insecticide applications.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFReliable monitoring of the invasive Halyomorpha halys abundance, phenology and geographic distribution is critical for its management. Halyomorpha halys adult and nymphal captures on clear sticky traps and in black pyramid traps were compared in 18 states across the Great Lakes, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, Pacific Northwest and Western regions of the United States. Traps were baited with commercial lures containing the H.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Air blast sprayers are not optimized for spraying the short statured trees in modern apple orchards, resulting in off target drift and variable coverage. A solid set canopy delivery system (SSCDS) consisting of a microsprayer array distributed throughout the orchard was investigated as a replacement agrochemical application method in this study. SSCDS's have the potential to optimize coverage, rapidly spray applications, and remove the operator and tractor from the orchard.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFField populations of Obliquebanded leafroller, Choristoneura rosaceana (Harris), collected from one commercial apple and one commercial cherry orchard in Kent and Newaygo Counties in western Michigan, respectively. A baseline toxicity study of eight insecticides including phosmet, bifenthrin, methomyl, indoxacarb, chlorantraniliprole, spinetoram, emamectin benzoate, and novaluron was conducted on 12- to 24-h-old larvae of the C. rosaceana field populations and compared with a susceptible strain.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDrosophila suzukii (Matsumura) (Diptera: Drosophilidae) is a devastating global pest of berry crops and cherries. Little is understood about its biology during the winter in northern temperate regions, including potential resources that it may utilize during this period. In this study, olfactory and behavioral responses of female D.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCentral-monitoring trap, multiple point release-recapture experiments were used to interpret Drosophila suzukii (Diptera: Drosophilidae) catch in a monitoring trap baited with a Scentry Biologicals commercial D. suzukii lure deployed in Michigan tart cherry orchards. The plume reach was found to be short (<3 m), while the maximum dispersive distance for 95% of the released D.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnviron Entomol
August 2017
The Drosophila suzukii (Matsumura) (Diptera: Drosophilidae) is a highly invasive species attacking a wide range of ripening soft-skinned fruits. A series of laboratory choice tests were conducted to determine whether different levels of rice vinegar affected attraction of Merlot wine to D. suzukii, as well as to compare attractiveness of two common fermentation food baits: wine-vinegar and yeast-sugar water mixtures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDuring bloom of spring orchard crops, bees are the primary providers of pollination service. Monitoring these insects for research projects is often done by timed observations or by direct aerial netting, but there has been increasing interest in blue vane traps as an efficient passive approach to collecting bees. Over multiple spring seasons in Michigan and Pennsylvania, orchards were monitored for wild bees using timed netting from crop flowers and blue vane traps.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExperiments were conducted in commercial apple orchards to determine if improved efficiencies in pheromone delivery may be realized by using aerosol pheromone dispensers for codling moth (CM), Cydia pomonella L., mating disruption. Specifically, we tested how reducing: pheromone concentration, period of dispenser operation, and frequency of pheromone emission from aerosol dispensers affected orientational disruption of male CM to pheromone-baited monitoring traps.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnviron Entomol
June 2015
Progress toward proof of the principal cause of insect mating disruption under a particular set of conditions has been hindered by a lack of logical rigor and clean falsifications of possible explanations. Here we make the case that understanding of mating disruption and optimization of particular formulations can be significantly advanced by rigorous application of the principles of strong inference. To that end, we offer a dichotomous key for eight distinct categories of mating disruption and detail criteria and methodologies for differentiating among them.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Isomate(®) CM MIST aerosol emitters (Pacific BioControl Corp, Vancouver, WA) containing 36 g of codlemone, (E,E)-8,10-dodecadien-1-ol, were deployed at various densities in a commercial apple orchard to generate dosage-response profiles in order to elucidate the behavioral mechanism of disruption.
Results: Moth captures decreased asymptotically as Isomate(®) CM MIST densities increased. Data fitting to Miller-Gut and Miller-de Lame plots yielded straight lines, with positive and negative slopes respectively.
Drosophila suzukii (Matsumura), an invasive pest of small and stone fruits, has been recently detected in 39 states of the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Europe. This pest attacks ripening fruit, causing economic losses including increased management costs and crop rejection. Ongoing research aims to improve the efficacy of monitoring traps.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe behavior of codling moth, Cydia pomonella (L.), responding to three attract-and-kill devices was compared in flight tunnel experiments measuring attraction and duration of target contact. Placing a 7.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPheromone-based mating disruption is used worldwide for management of the internal fruit feeding codling moth, Cydia pomonella (L.). There has been recent interest in the potential of improving mating disruption of C.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFField investigations were conducted to determine the resting locations of codling moth (Cydia pomonella [L.]) (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae) males and females in mating disrupted and nondisrupted apple (Malus domestica Borkh.) orchard plots.
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