Wild plants near farms may fuel a major fruit pest
McCulloch JB, Grant JA, Chu Y, Sial AA
Invasive Species
If you grow blueberries, raspberries, or other soft fruit, the wild brambles and berries along your fence line might be quietly breeding the fly that ruins your harvest before you ever pick it.
Spotted-wing drosophila is a tiny fly that lays eggs directly into ripe, soft fruit like blueberries, wrecking the harvest. Scientists built a simulation using temperature and plant availability data to figure out why fly populations spike in fall and winter in Georgia, and found that wild, non-crop plants growing near farms explain the pattern far better than the blueberry crop itself. That means managing the weedy edges around a farm could matter as much as managing the crop when it comes to controlling this pest.
Key Findings
A physiological age-structure simulation model combining temperature and host plant phenology was tested against trap catch data from 2015-2017 in southern Georgia.
The standard model (crop hosts peaking in spring, non-crop hosts peaking in fall/winter) correctly predicted the early summer population decline but failed to predict the fall/winter increase in fly trap catches.
A simulation using only non-crop (wild) host plants matched the actual trap data significantly better than the model including crop hosts, per Kolmogorov-Smirnov test comparisons.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Researchers built a computer model to predict when spotted-wing drosophila, a fly that ruins soft fruit like blueberries by laying eggs in it while still ripe, will surge in southern Georgia. The model worked best when it assumed the flies were relying on wild, non-crop plants near farms rather than the blueberry crop itself, especially in fall and winter.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Using a simulation model to assess the significance of temperature and host availability for population dynamics of Drosophila suzukii (Diptera: Drosophilidae).
Spotted-wing drosophila, Drosophila suzukii Matsumura (Diptera: Drosophilidae) (SWD), is an important pest of soft-skinned fruit around the globe because of its propensity to oviposit into ripe fru...
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