Pheromone Deployment Strategies for Mating Disruption of a Vineyard Mealybug.

The mealybug, Planococcus ficus (Signoret), is a primary vineyard pest in California and other grape-growing regions throughout the World. Mating disruption programs are commercially available to manage Pl. ficus, but widespread adoption has been limited, in part, by high costs compared with insecticide programs.

You are what you eat: fatty acid profiles as a method to track the habitat movement of an insect.

Tracking the movement of small organisms is of tremendous importance to understanding the ecology of populations, communities, and ecosystems. However, it remains one of the most difficult challenges facing the field of movement ecology. We developed an intrinsic marking technique for tracking small organisms using dietary fatty acid profiles as a biomarker as well as for clarifying source-sink dynamics between populations on a landscape level.

Genetic divergence is decoupled from ecological diversification in the Hawaiian Nesosydne planthoppers.

Adaptive radiation involves ecological shifts coupled with isolation of gene pools. However, we know little about what drives the initial stages of divergence. We study a system in which ecological diversification is found within a chronologically well-defined geological matrix to provide insight into this enigmatic phase of radiation.

Emergence asynchrony between herbivores leads to apparent competition in the field.

It has been established that herbivore populations can be structured by apparent competition, even if they do not compete directly for resources. But we lack evidence on the mechanisms behind such indirect competition. This study shows that temporal asynchronies in emergence time lead to apparent competition via shared natural enemies in a leafminer-parasitoid community.

History of IPM in California pears--50 years of pesticide use and the transition to biologically intensive IPM.

During the 1960s, the California pear industry, on a per acre basis, was among the heaviest users of pesticides. Each season, multiple sprays of up to 14 active ingredients (chlorinated hydrocarbons, organophosphates and carbamates) were typically applied for control of insects and mites. The cost of control escalated while damage from arthropod pests increased owing to greater pest resistance and more pest resurgence.

Contrasting the Tolerance of Wild and Domesticated Tomatoes to Herbivory: Agroecological Implications.

Application of plant life-history theory to strategies for breeding crop plants for sustainable agriculture remains relatively unexplored. We determined the relative tolerance of wild and domesticated tomatoes to simulated herbivory and evaluated plant characteristics that may contribute to tolerance. Wild and domesticated tomatoes were subjected to different levels of defoliation ranging from 0 to 70%.