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The brown stink bug, Euschistus servus,
measures a little under 1/2 inch long. Click the image for more information about
it.
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Defending Cotton from Stink Bugs
By Sharon
Durham
January 16, 2008 Years ago, boll weevils used to
bedevil cotton growersuntil a successful large-area eradication program
eliminated that problem for most U.S. producers. Now, stink bugs have begun to
be another problem for cotton growers, costing them about 3 percent of their
crop each year. Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists in Georgia have been testing
the effectiveness of using a combination of trap crops and pheromone traps to
alleviate stink bugs impact on cotton.
ARS entomologists
Glynn
Tillman in the
Crop
Protection and Management Research Laboratory at Tifton, Ga., and
Ted
Cottrell with the
Southeastern
Fruit and Nut Research Laboratory in Byron, Ga., are exploring this
combination to control two troublesome members of the family Pentatomidae:
brown stink bugs (Euschistus servus) and southern green stink bugs
(Nezara viridula). Trap crops are small plots of plants specially
planted to attract various pests away from cash crops. Pheromones are chemicals
produced by an insect or other animal that stimulate a response in others of
its kind, often serving as an attractant.
Planting peanut-cotton and corn-cotton farming configurations, or
"farmscapes," is common in the Southeast. Stink bugs develop on corn
and peanuts, and later they move into adjacent cotton fields when their food
supply runs low. However, stink bugs are more attracted to sorghum than to
cotton.
So the researchers planted sorghum as a trap crop in a strip along the
entire length of the common boundary of a peanut-cotton farmscape and placed
pheromone-baited capture traps about 45 to 50 feet apart in the sorghum. The
brown stink bug population was significantly lower in cotton fields with the
sorghum and pheromone traps than in those without them.
The researchers did the same for a corn-cotton farmscape with southern green
stink bugs. Again, the southern green stink bug population was found to be
lower in cotton fields with the sorghum trap crop than in cotton fields without
it.
ARS is the U.S. Department of
Agriculture's chief scientific research agency.
Read
more about this research in the January issue of Agricultural
Research magazine.