EAST LANSING, Mich. – Michigan State University entomologist and AgBioResearch scientist Larry Gut has found a new way to improve codling moth – the infamous "worm in the apple" – management techniques for Michigan’s fruit growers.
"With the current strategies, growers haven't been absolutely confident in knowing where codling moth populations are in their orchards," Gut said. "The pheromone traps currently in use have become the standard for trapping codling moth, but growers weren’t always seeing a correlation between the number caught in the traps and what was actually happening in the orchard."
Gut's lab created and tested more than a dozen different traps of varying sizes, shapes and orientation to see what made a codling moth males preferred. What they found effective was changing the trap orientation to hanging perpendicular to a tree, while working with trap designs in the laboratory flight tunnel (where the pests are flying about freely in a controlled area and closely monitored). This novel approach, coupled with a newer, smaller trap design, resulted in a trap that not only attracted the pest, it captured nearly 100 percent of the male codling moths that made contact with it.
This trap is in its first year of use, and the Michigan Apple Committee has been a funding partner along with Michigan's plant agriculture initiative Project GREEEN in its development. Gut has done the preliminary work to patent the design, and it is also being tested in Australia.
Other institutions have become partners in this research, and funding from the North Central Regional Integrated Pest Management Program is being sought to continue the project. Gut plans on writing a bulletin that details procedures for monitoring codling moth and doing field evaluation of the proposed protocols in commercial orchards in Michigan.
Additional funding for this research came from the United States Department of Agriculture National Research Initiative, Trécé Inc. and the Washington Tree Fruit Research Committee.
For more information about Project GREEEN, visit www.greeen.msu.edu. For more information about MSU AgBioResearch, visit www.agbioresearch.msu.edu.
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