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ARS Home » Northeast Area » Kearneysville, West Virginia » Appalachian Fruit Research Laboratory » Innovative Fruit Production, Improvement, and Protection » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #313471
Title: Establishing the behavioral basis for an attract-and-kill strategy to manage the invasive Halyomorpha halys in apple orchards

Author
item Morrison, William - Rob
item LEE, DOO-HYUNG - Gachon University
item Short, Brent
item Khrimian, Ashot
item Leskey, Tracy

Submitted to: Journal of Pest Science
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 6/20/2015
Publication Date: 7/5/2015
Citation: Morrison III, W.R., Lee, D., Short, B.D., Khrimian, A., Leskey, T.C. 2015. Establishing the behavioral basis for an attract-and-kill strategy to manage the invasive Halyomorpha halys in apple orchards. Journal of Pest Science. doi: 10.1007/s10340-015-0679-6.

Interpretive Summary: The brown marmorated stink bug is an invasive pest native to Asia that is highly damaging to tree fruit crops in the United States. Growers have increased their use of insecticide inputs nearly four-fold leading to reductions in fruit injury, but also severe disruption of sustainable pest management practices. Strategies are needed to reduce insecticide use to improve overall ecological and economic sustainability of the system. One approach takes advantage of pheromones to lure stink bugs to a precise location where they can be killed. Researchers have found this “attract and kill” approach would work well in a commercial apple orchard because potential attract and kill sites created by the pheromone lures are very small. Therefore, this would require little space and minimal insecticide inputs, making them cheaper and easier for growers to manage. We also found that once stink bugs arrive at potential attract and kill sites in apple trees, they remain for almost an entire day, increasing the likelihood of successful control. Our results suggest that attract-and-kill may be an effective strategy for controlling brown marmorated stink bug in apple orchards while improving overall ecological and economic sustainability of the system.

Technical Abstract: Halyomorpha halys (Stål) is an invasive, polyphagous insect that inflicts serious economic injury on specialty crops in the United States. Growers have been forced to respond by increasing the frequency of broad-spectrum insecticide applications. One strategy to reduce reliance on insecticides is “attract-and-kill”, whereby, the targeted insect is attracted to a spatially precise location to be eliminated via a killing agent such as insecticides. For apple growers in particular, this approach involves baiting select border row apple trees with attractive semiochemicals including the H. halys aggregation pheromone and synergist, and subsequently treating these baited trees with effective insecticides for H. halys, thereby, continuously removing the pest from the orchard agroecosystem. However, several baseline questions need to be answered prior to implementation in commercial orchards for H. halys. These include elucidating the arrestment area and retention time elicited by the pheromone and synergist when deployed in host apple trees to ensure that H. halys is retained in a spatially precise and limited location sufficiently long to be killed by effective insecticides so as not to invade untreated areas of the orchard. Methodologically, we employed field studies with black pyramid traps, harmonic radar, and in-orchard trials using baited apple trees sprayed weekly to quantify H. halys annihilation and fruit injury in and near these "attract-and-kill" sites. The arrestment area for H. halys was confined to 2.5 m around a pheromone and synergist source regardless of pheromone dose (100 or 1000 mg), while the retention capacity of adults was significantly increased by pairing aggregation pheromone and synergist with a fruiting host plant compared with nonhost sites. Damage to fruit harvested from baited "attract-and-kill" trees was high, but minimal in surrounding unbaited neighboring apple trees. Overall, our results suggest "attract-and-kill" may be an effective strategy for controlling H. halys season-long.