Project Number: 6202-22000-025-00
Project Type: Appropriated

Start Date: Oct 01, 2004
End Date: Oct 31, 2005

Objective:
Develop new and improved methods of controlling boll weevil and secondary pest populations in conjunction with areawide efforts to suppress or eliminate the boll weevil from cotton production areas of the United States. Determine the impact of pest ecology, population dynamics, and interactions on implementation of areawide suppression.

Approach:
Overwintering strategies of boll weevil in tropical and temperate climates will be identified, quantified, and compared through laboratory and field studies of their ability to survive through reproductive dormancy and other means, including quiescence in leaf litter and other cover, encapsulation in desiccated bolls, etc. Boll weevil movement will be evaluated through trapping systems and ecological and mark-recapture studies. Selected substances will be evaluated in the laboraotry and field for biological activity (insecticidal, phagostimulatory, attraction) for developing attracticidal formulation as well as conventional insecticidal control for boll weevils. Areawide boll weevil management strategies developed on the basis of ecological information and utilizing existing and developed cultural and chemical control tactics will be evaluated under a variety of production systems. Impacts of conventional and developed boll weevil management tactics on beneficial and secondary pest arthropod populations will be assessed through field and laboratory studies.

Project Team

Westbrook, John Greenberg, Shoil Showler, Allan

Related National Programs

Crop Protection & Quarantine (304)