From lrbulluck@ucdavis.edu Fri Mar 24 12:33:25 2000 Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2000 08:54:48 -0600 From: Russ Bulluck To: Sustanable Agriculture Subject: Re: gypsy moths/parasitoids Gypsy moth is an exotic pest. It _will_ defoliate pines (but only after defoliating all hardwoods expect tulip poplar, which the bugs refuse to eat). The female gypsy moth doesn't fly, but _can_ lay 500-1000 eggs. The "Gypsy moth Front" moves slowly (except when eggs are laid on cars) and the first year of an infestation ussually involves limited defoliation. The second gypsy moth season usually involves defoilation of all oak species (the gypsy moth prefers White and Chestnut oak on the eastern seaboard) in the forest. By the third year, defoliation of the complete forest usually occurs before larval maturity, sending the worms out in force to consume almost anything green! Defoliation of evergreen species (from what I understand) will cause widespread devastation to the evergreens. It's usually at this point that parasitoids, and viruses catch up with the front, and the population crashes, though not before leaving a winter-like landscape in midsummer! There is also a Asian Gypsy moth present on the west coast, and, as I understand it, the female flies. Further some hybrid gypsy moths (I believe) are present in the Midwest US. There are a number of biological controls that are effective, including NPV (nucleopolyhedron virus), Entomophaga maiomaiga, and other fungi, as well as Btk. -------------------- Russ Bulluck Visiting Post-Doctoral Scholar Department of Plant Pathology 1 Shields Ave UC-Davis Davis, CA 95616 lrbulluck@ucdavis.edu ------------------------------------------------------------- The soil population is so complex that it manifestly cannot be dealt with as a whole with any detail by any one person, and at the same time it plays so important a part in the soil economy that it must be studied. --Sir E. John Russell The Micro-organisms of the Soil, 1923 ------------------------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command "unsubscribe sanet-mg". If you receive the digest format, use the command "unsubscribe sanet-mg-digest". To Subscribe to Digest: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command "subscribe sanet-mg-digest". All messages to sanet-mg are archived at: http://www.sare.org/san/htdocs/hypermail