- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Yigen Chen and Steve Seybold continually trapped the reddish-brown insect, about a third of the size of a grain of rice, for three years along Putah Creek in Davis, Calif., and recorded its daily and seasonal flight behavior. They lured the insect into the traps with a synthetic version of its aggregation pheromone.
“We discovered the collective and interactive effects of four environmental factors on the crepuscular (twilight) flight behavior of the insect,” said lead author Chen, a research entomologist and project scientist with the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. “We found that the optimal trapping conditions are a combination of moderate to warm temperatures, around 79 to 81 Fahrenheit; low light intensity; low wind speed, 0.6 to 2.5 miles per hour; and moderate barometric pressure, 755 to 757.”
“Understanding the walnut twig beetle's seasonal flight cycle and factors that govern its flight are critical first steps in the early detection of invasive species prior to implementing pest eradication or integrated pest management (IPM) programs,” they wrote in their research article, “Crepuscular Flight Activity of an Invasive Insect Governed by Interacting Abiotic Factors,”published in the Aug. 26 edition of the Public Library of Science, PLOS ONE.
However, when coupled with a hitchhiking fungus, Geosmithia morbida, it causes what is known as thousand cankers disease. The beetles create numerous galleries beneath the bark, resulting in fungal infection and canker formation. The large numbers of cankers led to the name, thousand cankers disease.
As the disease advances, the health of the tree declines and eventually it dies, sometimes within a three-year period, said Seybold, who has been studying the beetle and the newly discovered fungus with its barrel-shaped spores since 2008.
When male beetles initiate new galleries, they produce an aggregation pheromone. As the population increases, the flight response of males and females similarly increases.
Mating disruption or interruption of insect aggregation is crucial to controlling such insect pests as the walnut twig beetle in IPM programs, the entomologists pointed out. “Understanding the interactions among abiotic environmental factors on flight activity, should increase the efficacy of these methods in a specific IPM program to control the beetle,” Chen said.
“The primarily crepuscular flight activity had a Gaussian relationship with ambient temperature and barometric pressure but a negative exponential relationship with increasing light intensity and wind speed,” they wrote in their abstract. “A model selection procedure indicated that the four abiotic factors collectively and interactively governed P. juglandis diurnal flight.”
New knowledge of the primary periods of seasonal flight (May‒July and September‒October) “provides some guidance for when semiochemical-based interruption of aggregation may be applied most efficaciously,” they said..
Seybold, one of the first scientists to study the beetle and fungus in California, served on a scientific team that developed guidelines and trapping methods for the beetle. In 2010 and 2011, the team discovered and later patented the aggregation pheromone for the beetle and conducted scientific trials in northern California.
Late in the summer of 2011, the team demonstrated the efficacy of the pheromone as a flight trap bait. The bait lures both male and female beetles into a small plastic funnel trap.
The walnut twig beetle, native to the southwestern United States and Mexico, and widely distributed in Colorado, Arizona, California, and New Mexico, has now been detected throughout much of the United States: in nine western and five eastern states. In 2013, it was reported in northern Italy.
The earliest symptom of thousand cankers disease is yellowing foliage that progresses rapidly to brown wilted foliage, then finally branch mortality. Branch mortality and decline of the tree crown are one of three major symptoms of thousand cankers disease. The others are numerous small cankers on branches and the trunk, and holes and other evidence of tiny bark beetles.
Related links:
- Thousand Cankers Disease and the Walnut Twig Beetle in California (UC IPM)
- Walnut Twig Beetle (USDA Forest Service)
- Pest Alert, Walnut Twig Beetle and Thousand Cankers Disease (Colorado State University)
- Thousandcankers.com (This site is a collaborative effort between the Northeastern Area State and Private Forestry, the USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station, the Purdue University Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, the Hardwood Tree Improvement and Regeneration Center, the American Walnut Manufacturers Association, and the Walnut Council.)