Wisconsin Public Television University Place Wednesday Nite at the Lab  The Bugs Have Gone Crazy Phil Pellitteri  Aug. 29,2012 UP762  CC >> Thank you for watching Wednesday Nite at the Lab this evening. I'm Cassie Immel from here at the Biotechnology Center. Tonight I bring you Dr. Phil Pelletteri. He is a distinguished faculty associate in the Department of Entomology where he has directed the Insect Diagnostic Lab since May of 1978. He gives 50 to 60 Extension lectures each year around campus or around the state and has teaching responsibilities on campus. He is also a state specialist with the UW Extension Cooperative Extension. Without further ado, here's Phil Pelletteri. [APPLAUSE] >> Well, thank you. In case you recognize the name, yes I used to drive a garbage truck. [LAUGHTER] Yes I did grow up in Madison. 

That fact is the way I worked my way through both high school and college. And my dad had an interest in me taking over the business and said, son, there will always be garbage. And after working on the trucks for the number of years I did, I said, dad, there's always going to be bugs. [LAUGHTER] It's a delight for me. I received my degrees here in Madison and had no business being here, as traditionally when you graduate from an institution you need to go elsewhere. And I was originally hired on a three-month appointment to run the diagnostic lab, and I'm now in my 34th year, and I will tell you it has been a delight. One of the things that makes my job so entertaining is that I am guaranteed from every year to be introduced to things I have not see before. And that's basically the gist of what I'm going to share with you is some interesting things that are coming about. And some of them are problematic, but I always do want to confess the end of the world is not coming because it's not a fact that the bugs are taking over. They have been in charge all along, we just haven't admitted it. 

[LAUGHTER] So with that, we'll start out. It has been a very interesting year. I define my years, to some degree, by when I start praying for a frost. [LAUGHTER] And that was three weeks ago. [LAUGHTER] This has been and will be a record-setting year for the number of specimens I have processed, the number of emails that I have handled, and there are some underlying factors to that. One of them, indeed, is just the way we communicate. Right now, about 60% of what I processed in the lab are digital images of things that people see and send me, which is a very efficient way to do things but something I could not have envisioned 35 years ago as a way of looking at insects. Now, if we talk about what kind of things had an influence this year on insect populations, March was absolutely amazing. I remember getting an email from a good friend up in the Upper Peninsula who was capturing moths on the 16th of March that had never been captured earlier than the 15th of April in this state. So right away you knew that some interesting things were probably getting up in here, and that pattern will really kind of come through my talk about some things that we're seeing. 

And then the drought that we've experienced, and still in some degree are experiencing, 1988 was a year that was really quite interesting to live through, and there are some real similarities. And I won't be covering a lot of stuff with that, but hot dry does give you a whole different complement. And that's the one thing, no matter what weather you present to me, I can come up with insects that will take advantage of it. So you never worry about the insects suffering from things being too hot, too dry, too wet, too cold. But the other interesting thing, and this really comes, again, from some experiences in 1988, is the growing season is basically a month longer. And what you see are insects that typically will go through one generation a year, will literally try to go through a second generation. Or some that have two generations, like Colorado potato beetle, are trying a third. So those are kind of an interesting pattern to watch, but it does keep one a little unsettled because you're never quite, I argue that sometimes the insects forget to read the books that Phil does. So let's start with how the season started. I started receiving a number of pictures of these. 

These are egg masses of insects, and primarily this was in the northern part of the state. Now, looking at the sheer number and the shape, I can tell you they are cutworms. And, to be honest, that's a wimpy answer because there are over 200 species of cutworms in the state. And we're not just talking a few eggs. Maybe a little hard to pick up here, but I think I counted 12 egg masses on the overhang alone of this. So they're plastered all over the sides of people's houses and the like, and one can only envision, since cutworms don't typically lay their eggs on structures, how many eggs were getting laid out in the environment. The big question to me was what species? And so I pleaded with some of the people I was corresponding with, if you see any moths on the side of your house, please send me a picture to see if I can get a better answer. And this is the little beast that they sent. This is called the variegated cutworm. And we literally identify these by the little dashes and dots and spots on the wings. 

And this one has kind of a kidney-shaped marking and also a couple oval-shaped markings. Now, what's significant about variegated cutworm, it is probably, among the cutworms, probably the one that has the widest host range and potentially can be one of the biggest stinkers. And so right away I was getting a little nervous where this was all going to go. Many cutworms feed at the ground level, but this one is inclined to climb up the plant and even feed. And we have cases where we have documented feeding in apple trees up on the fruit in the tree. But among things that are dear to our hearts, tomatoes, soy beans, alfalfa, and potatoes, and then hostas. There's very few things that I can blame for eating hostas, but when people have hostas disappearing at night and nothing in the day, variegated cutworm is the first place I go. Petunias is another thing. And so I was waiting for it. And so people would send me some of these things. 

And what's kind of difficult at times is they do most of their feeding at night and tend to lay rather low during the day. And so they're not overly obvious. And they start from little tiny caterpillars and get upwards of about an inch and a half to almost two inches in height or in length. But what's distinctive about them is they have these little white spots right down the back. Okay, variegated cutworms, we've seen them before, but I have not seen them like this. This picture was taken in a soy bean in Fond du Lac, and I'm not sure how many are there. That's why we have graduate students. You say, go count them. [LAUGHTER] But I will tell you that I have old 35 millimeter slides in my files that I inherited talking about these kind of cutworm problems in the state, but I had never experienced anything like this. But considering the influx of moths, and we have since learned that those moths came out of Oklahoma and blew up here in those first spring winds. 

And this is what the soy bean field looked like. Now, your first indication or you would suggest that maybe this was under water and that drowned it out, but this is high ground. And so they basically mowed it right on down. So they had lots of problems in the northern half of the state. Basically from Eau Claire to Green Bay north. Not a whole lot of activity here other than a little bit of this stuff around Lake Winnebago. So that was the first interesting plague to be exposed to. And we had a little bit of a resurgence on a second generation. Although, it's quite typical when you start to see insect densities like this you can anticipate insect disease, parasites, other things coming in and often preventing the population from going. >> Is that the whole field? >> That's just one little area. 

That was not staged. They just took a picture because they were all congregated there. I have a feeling they were migrating a little bit away from where there was no food and going into the place where there was some soy beans available. >> Was this in March also? >> No, this picture was taken in May. >> Is that the correct soil you see? >> Yes. Yes. Okay, so then as things progressed, a person in Iowa County sent me this picture of their baptisia or false indigo and said something has been chewing on it. It's pretty obvious that there was some kind of insect, but I can think of a handful of things maybe. But they were nice enough to send me a picture of a very distinctive orangish caterpillar with the little white and black dots, and with literally hundreds of potential species, I knew I had seen this before but it just didn't ring a bell. And so you go off to your books and the like, and it turns out to be something that is called commonly the genista broom moth. 

And its caterpillar is called the genista caterpillar. Now, if you do a search on the internet for this, you get all kinds of information out of Texas because that's where this insect belongs. We don't see genista caterpillars up here very often, but they blew up here and it seems that this baptisia is the plant they were looking for. And since those original reports in May, I've had at least another dozen reports in various parts of the state where people had their baptisia chewed on. Now, the good thing about this one is one would anticipate a typical, even warm, winter will prevent this from breeding, and then we would need these kind of specialized conditions. So I don't expect this to come, but that, again, underlined this fact of how dynamic those spring winds were in the kind of things they brought to us. I used to be naïve and think there was only one species of squash bug in the state, but as I started to see specimens coming in, and when I think of squash bugs, and you may have heard be say this on Public Radio before, but squash bugs are kind of a southern creature to me, as in central Illinois and south. But squash bugs have become quite prevalent. And it turns out rather than the common squash bug, which is still the most common one we run into, this one is called the rough-legged squash bug. And there's a third minor squash bug species that we have seen. 

In all cases, feeding on people's zucchinis and the like. I had never been exposed to them, but when you get into the museum collection, we have references of them being present in the state, just never in enough numbers to catch anybody's attention in their garden. But this year they took off. And my comment on Public Radio about the Governor moved us to Missouri and didn't tell us, well this is a classic example of something I think that is thriving. And what they're thriving from is the lack of significant cold weather in the winter, which really has had a major effect on insects moving northward into Minnesota, parts of Iowa, and in particular Wisconsin. Now, this one really caught me. This is a state record. It is in the squash bug family, or what we call the leaf-footed bug. These things are identified by those wide flailing hind legs that you see. But this one is over an inch long, it has somewhat different markings, and what's distinctive about this is that little band behind the head, the kind of yellowish, lighter band. 

And there was a gentleman up in Wisconsin Rapids that caught this one on his squash, and he really had it identified already. He got on the internet and did a little work, and he identified it as the citron bug. Now, the citron bug is typically found in the southeast United States. We're talking Florida, Georgia, Alabama, where it both feeds on squashes but also citrus, believe it or not. That's where the name comes from. So it is somewhat of a pest of oranges and the like. We have no records of citron bug ever in Wisconsin. No collections in our museum. No references we could find. Now we do. 

How it got to Wisconsin Rapids, I'm not sure. Now, there you could suggest maybe it was a hitchhiker, but the one thing that was a little unsettling about that theory as I was doing a Public Radio show and one of the things now when you're on Larry's show is people can submit things to Facebook. And somebody submitted an immature squash bug that I am sure is the nymph of this which means we have breeding populations in the state. >> Does that mean citrus trees are not far behind? >> That could be. [LAUGHTER] My neighbor's growing peaches and they look awful good, so it is definitely a changing dynamic. So this one, I suspect, will freeze out. But the gentleman was nice enough to send the specimen down. It has now been deposited in our collection, so the next person that bumps into one can see that at least we had some records for it. Now, this one maybe isn't quite as a southern creature because I have seen this a handful of times and numbers in my career. But this one is kind of a fun one to watch. 

You might recognize this as a hornworm. Hornworms belong to a family of moths of which we have over 20 representatives in this state. Not all the species have that distinctive spike on the back, but what's somewhat unique about this species it is quite variable in color. And although the classic one has these black and yellow bands down the back, I will show you a couple variations, but what it turns into is this very interesting moth called the white-lined sphinx moth. And white-lined sphinx remind you of a hummingbird when they fly. And, somewhat unique, most of the members of this group are night fliers, but these guys will tend to fly even in the middle of the day at times. And there are certain years that we seem to have many outbreaks. I was expecting one this year when the county agent from Chippewa Falls called me and said there are thousands of these crawling across the highway north of town. And so many so that, again, we knew we had something going on. And we do suspect that these moths did blow in here. 

Now, this moth is generally distributed throughout the United States, and one of my colleagues studies very closely the behavior of this moth because it's a major pollinator of columbine out in the west, in Utah, in Colorado, and the like. And so she's very interested in rearing these things so that she can do her genetic research. So I was all excited about all the moth or caterpillars up here, and we sent her graduate students up into that area. But to show you how misleading these guys can be, this is the same species, and you notice that rather than distinct solid black lines, I've got a couple lines but I've got some other markings. In fact, this is also probably a brother or sister of that original, the second one I've shown you, and shows you the variability of these larvae. But these all grow up to be the same kind of moth. So we had, again, a pretty good population in the northern half of the state, which is starting to suggest that whatever this weather incident was that a lot of that air got pushed and dumped up north and not down here because I've not seen similar kinds of reports out of Janesville or Madison or the like. Now, what makes this one somewhat unique is that it's a real generalist feeder. And one of its favorite host plants is purslane, the weed. So that's good. 

But, unfortunately, when it's done with that, it has been known to feed on all kinds of perennial plants and whatnot. So hawk moths you don't normally think of as pests, but this one on occasion can be a little bit mischievous and the like. And just to show you how unique some of these can be, this picture came to me two days ago by a gentleman by the name of Vince. This is a different species. This is in the genus sphinx, and you'll notice it has some very different side markings and that very interesting, almost looks like a child has painted it, horn on the back, and I'm not so sure we totally understand some of these structures on insects. You have to make the argument there's a reason for it because insects wouldn't waste the time, but I, for the life of me, have never been able to come up with a good explanation of what the horn on a hornworm does. Now, this is one that really caught me. I got an email from a woman in Columbus, Wisconsin, who had seen a butterfly flying in her flower garden and took a picture of it, and this is the picture she first sent me. And, honestly, she sent me two pictures, this one and then a picture of a brown butterfly. And she said I think I see a zebra swallowtail. 

Now, I will tell you as a kid I would have traded both my bike and my sister and maybe more to have a zebra swallowtail because it is not an insect you find in Wisconsin. And when I saw the two pictures she sent me, the one on the bottom had this brown butterfly and I knew it wasn't a zebra and I said I'm sorry, I think it's a silver spotted skipper. She said no, no, look at the first picture closely. And so you blow it up and you start to see on that nice white spiked flower there is a butterfly. And this is the butterfly. It is the zebra swallowtail. Now, in my whole career I had never heard of anybody that saw or captured a zebra swallowtail in Wisconsin. It's typically found in southern Illinois south. It breeds on pawpaw, which is a plant that doesn't grow up here so you wouldn't expect it to be found up here. There are historic records. 

The Milwaukee Public Museum has some in the 1900s in the Milwaukee area. I had a conversation with a gentleman who grew up in Monroe, Wisconsin, and when he was a kid he said he captured one and put it in his collection. But few and far between. But, that's a verified sighting. There is no question about it. There's no other swallowtail that can be. And, as we started to look in the records, if you ever are interested in Wisconsin butterflies, there's a lovely site called Wisconsin Butterflies that's put together by a gentleman by the name of Mike Reese. Exquisite pictures of which Mike has taken them all. Great documentation of what counties and when they fly and the like. And Mike found that he had some reports of this butterfly also being seen in Iowa County this May. 

But previous to that, we didn't have any kind of record for at least the last 15 to 20 years, and even then some of those earlier records were somewhat questioned. But there's no question now. And so they blew up here, and, unfortunately, without the pawpaw they're not going to breed but that, to me, was really pretty special. So that's one of those ones you run around the halls and get your colleague and say you won't believe what I just saw. Now, this one is an interesting one. In fact, I had stopped home for a second and NBC News had just published the most recent data on West Nile. It was up to 1569 confirmed cases with 66 deaths. And West Nile is a very interesting disease. This is the biggest outbreak, definitely, that we have seen. It appears it will present bigger than any one we have ever seen, and what they're counting that on is the number of cases this early. 

West Nile is typically a late summer and fall disease. And one of the interesting things about this disease is that it really is a bird disease. It is a virus that circulates in the bird populations. The mosquito that's responsible for the major transmission is primarily a bird feeder, but some of the species have all the sudden a host preference change in the late summer so they were more inclined to feed on humans. So that's where you can get the switch. And it's a genus we call Culex. Now, believe it or not, we have 54 kinds of mosquitoes in Wisconsin. And of those 54, there's only 4 that belong to this genus Culex. So this is not the dominate ruin your picnic or barbeque type of mosquito, but what makes it somewhat unique are two things. One, it is a genus of mosquitoes that over winters as adults, not as eggs. 

And these adults would typically be in caves in similar environments. So, if anybody ever gets a mosquito bite in January or February, it is with a Culex mosquito. I can easily say that. And you do occasionally see them trying to spend the winter in your basement on the walls, which is the closest environment to a cave we have in our homes. It's cool, it's damp, it's dark. And they will try to get through the winter as adults, and that's, indeed, where the virus spends the winter is in the stomach of the female mosquitoes. They come out to feed, transmit it to the birds, we get a buildup in the birds, and then the cycle goes. And I'm sure many of you are aware crows are really susceptible. And one of the early warning signs you have a lot of West Nile is the crows start to die. And the first positive crow to die in Madison was about seven weeks ago. 

Now, the way it works is once we get a positive in a county, we know it's here, and then we kind of look at other places. Now, the other thing about Culex is it is not one that is necessarily associated with heavy rains and flooding. It is a backyard mosquito that will breed in birdbaths, flowerpots, potentially even rainwater if it's not held correctly, and it likes polluted water rather than clean water. And so even though this year has been incredibly quiet in general because there's be very little flooding so most of our mosquitoes have not had the opportunity to breed, this one doesn't rely on that near as much. And so you can see their populations really can still do reasonably well in a very dry year. People-made things, like old tires, are potential habitat. And, again, the more polluted the water, the happier they are which is exactly what happens when you get such dry conditions because everything starts to shrink, becomes more organic, that's the environment they tend to move into. >> Why is that? It has more nutrients for them? >> Yes. And less competition really with the other species of mosquitoes. Now, we have been blessed in Wisconsin, we've only had one case confirmed so far. 

I would not be surprised to see that number kick up a little bit. But if we go back to the last time we had significant outbreaks of West Nile in the Midwest, if you're aware of this year it's really down in Texas and Oklahoma where the problems are. And what's going to problematic down there as much as anything else is they have another month to six weeks to mosquito season than we do. They have a much longer fall which means cases are going to continue to go up. So they do have a struggle on their hands. But even in 2002, which was the bad year in the Midwest where Illinois was the state with the highest mortality and especially in the areas around Chicago, Wisconsin has historically only had about 10% the number of cases as the states around us in a bad year. That does have something to do with mosquito populations, among other things. So we really don't anticipate a major outbreak in Wisconsin, but we will have some cases. And as I said, on a national basis one expects it to take off. Now, it's interesting, back about four or five years ago when we watched West Nile march across the country, it was about a four- or five-year process. 

It was quite bad in the northeast, and then it moved kind of the Ohio, Pennsylvania area, then we got it here in the Midwest. Then it went into areas of Colorado was the next couple years. And then lately it's been more problematic along California down to Arizona. And when I heard about the Arizona cases, I though, my this doesn't make sense because even though I said it's not as dependent on rainfall, we know Arizona is a very dry state. To be honest, some of this has to do with the economy because the dynamic there was with all the houses that were getting foreclosed on and abandoned, we had swimming pools in the back of those places that were not being cared for which means we get polluted water and guess what, now I've got a great big pond to breed my mosquitoes in Arizona. So once you understood that dynamic, you understood why there was an outbreak there. So this will be a little bit of a stay-tuned, but as I said, I really would not anticipate. And one of my other arguments why you don't worry about this as much here is we have no organized mosquito abatement districts in the state because we've never had the kind of human diseases as the states south of us. Even in Illinois, if you've ever lived in Illinois, you know that they have organized multi-county districts that go out and spray and treat the breeding sites and the like. We've never been forced to do that. 

So, as I said, I really don't anticipate this continuing to ramp up. Okay, a few more of these kind of southerns. Now, some very predictable insects that come up here are leafhoppers. There's a critter called a potato leafhopper that doesn't have the respect to spend the winter here. It blows up in the first good southerly air flows. And we can literally see it come out in the rains when it comes up here. Now, some years this can happen in April. Some years it doesn't happen until the second week of June. It just depends how the weather patterns go. Well, this year we got a pretty good influx of leafhoppers, and, in particular, they're quite tough on alfalfa where their feeding causes a symptom called hopper burn which causes what appears to be this little bit innocent yellowish tipping and margining to the plants. 

But it causes a significant stunting and a significant loss of quality which is a big issue for farmers who are trying to get the highest quality feed to give their dairy cows. So this is an insect that they unfortunately have to pay a lot of attention to. So we got a big flight up here early. They like it hot, they like it dry, so they've been doing quite successful. The only good news about this insect is when you get to about the 15th of August and we start to get somewhat cooler nights, they're populations take a crash. And although I can't give you the exact reason for it, I just think they're getting pneumonia myself. [LAUGHTER] But that's Phil's theory. So, we had a good, good influx of potato leafhopper. They're putting quite a bit of pressure. They're also fond of strawberries, and they're also fond of potatoes, as the name implies. 

The plants that are susceptible, literally what happens is a chemical change in the leaf where the plant changes its chemistry and starts to produce simple sugars rather than other components. And so that tends to cause the plant some significant quality and quantity loss. And this appears a little subtle, but the symptom is this yellowish margin on the plant. This happens to be a bean plant that's suffering from it. Now, to give you some indication of how bad it was, typically the way we sample for this, we take a butterfly net or a modified butterfly net called a sweep net, and if we catch one leafhopper in a sweep through the alfalfa, that's considered and economic population. We were experiencing 30 to 35 per sweep in some alfalfa fields this year. So we were way above the levels that we can tolerate. And also, another southern leafhopper called the aster leafhopper came up here. And what makes this one significant, it carries a mycoplasma-like disease called aster yellows. And we can watch these guys migrate up, and one of the things we try to do is predict how bad the disease problem will be by where the leafhoppers are and what percentage of the leafhoppers are carrying disease. 

And traditionally, anything above 3% makes us nervous. In the first springs migrants we found were at 10%. So we knew we were going to have experienced quite a bit of yellows disease. So if you notice that your marigolds or your asters or other composite plants, but it also gets into carrots and celery and a whole, onions, there's a whole bunch of plants that get it, as the name implies, the plant tends to take a yellowing color but it becomes very stunted, and it won't grow out of it. So you're almost inclined to blame it on something else. It's a very subtle type of reaction except when you see it next to a healthy plant. And so we've seen quite a bit of this, this year in particular. Flowers stay green. They don't produce like they normally would. That's kind of another classic symptom. 

And so this has been one of the worst years I've seen. Although, interesting enough, I guess I could make the argument at a 10% infectivity level, it wasn't as bad as I was expecting. I thought we wouldn't have a marigold in the state that was healthy, and it really wasn't quite that bad. It also had an economic impact on the state. We used to grow Chinese asters in the state as a cut flower back in the 1900s. This disease wiped it out. It literally is that extensive. Once you see the symptoms, the plant can't be saved. It takes the plant probably five to seven days to show you symptoms, and so often you have a higher infectivity rate than you know of. So it can be really quite problematic. 

It's also quite problematic on lettuce, which is a crop we don't grow all that much of in the state, but by the time you start to discover it in a lettuce field, it's lost, unfortunately. Now, this one I added today. Today was an interesting day. This is a type of fruit fly. And we call it the spotted wing Drosophila, which is the scientific name of the genus of fruit flies, because the males have that very distinct black spot in the forewing. Now, you might say so what, another fruit fly. Well, this one has a little bit different behavior which is why it causes problems. Most fruit flies lay their eggs in fruit that is in major decay. In fact, if you ever get fruit flies and call me up, what I will tell you is they're not feeding on the rip bananas that are on your kitchen table. They might be attracted to it as adult flies, but in order to breed, the fruit has to be in such decay that there's a very high yeast population, and I would tell you if it was bananas they would be so rotten you wouldn't even make banana bread out of them. 

Okay. Now, an interesting fact, though, it's the maggots are feeding on the yeast and not the ripe fruit itself. What makes this critter quite unique is the female, and this is a picture of the female's egg-laying device. The average fruit fly has a sponge-like egg-laying device that only allows her to lay her eggs in soft tissue. The spotted wing Drosophila has a saw-like egg-laying device which allows her to cut into fruit and lay her eggs in the field before the fruit is harvested. Now, this is an Asian species. It has been discovered in the United States since 2007. There have been significant populations in the Pacific northwest. There have been significant populations in the south and even up into the Carolinas. And I will tell you, our first record of this insect was two years ago in Racine we caught a few in an apple orchard in the very late summer. 

No crop damage. Good news. Last year, a few flies were discovered in Dane County and also just south of La Crosse up in Vernon County, but they were only caught in what we call vinegar traps. We put out, basically, a pie plate with a little vinegar. The fruit flies come in, we catch them, we bring them into the laboratory, and we look at them. So we knew they were here, but they weren't causing crop damage. And what we speculated is that they were freezing out, but during the course of the summer new ones can be brought in but they got up here late enough they didn't cause any problems. Until this week. Again, here's a closeup of that saw-like egg-laying device. And that's how we identified the females is literally to extrude the ovipositor and look for those characteristic teeth. 

This is a picture of a strawberry I took this morning. This came from Vernon County. It was a fresh market person, and that is an insect pin and that interesting little white structure that seems to have tails is a spotted wing Drosophila egg. This egg was laid in the field before the fruit is harvested. So here's the problem with this insect is your fruit's infested when you pick it, and you bring it in to store it and off it's running. These are raspberries. A significant loss in the southwest part of the state and the west central part of the state. And in a conversation this afternoon with somebody, we think we've got it up in Antigo. I think it's all throughout the state. Why is it throughout the state? I think we had an early blow in because I've got all these other insects I can make the argument blew in. 

Why wouldn't spotted wing Drosophila blow in here early enough? And fruit flies go through a generation in about two weeks. So we've probably been through three or four cycles minimum to get to this point. So, the unfortunate thing is the growers had no idea this was coming. Another thing that makes this insect very disappointing is it's attacking it just about the time you're going to harvest the fruit which means you have to spray the fruit before you harvest it which is the last thing in the world you want to do. So it really does pose some significant potential problems to us. What we're hopeful for is that this insect, again, will be knocked out with our typical winters, and then next year, one would think that we wouldn't have a similar weather pattern, and so maybe it will go into a minor player. But we're seeing similar kinds of reports out of Minnesota and Iowa, and, as I said, everything is pointing to that we have gotten a major establishment. But the argument is why didn't we see this two years ago? Why didn't we see the fruit damage? We're questioning what's going to happen with our grape crop because it does get into grapes, at least in the Pacific northwest. The good news for our cranberry producers is we know that it will not go after cranberries because they're too thick-skinned, which opens up a question for plant breeders: if you can breed a thick enough skinned raspberry, maybe we can breed a resistant raspberry. But then the question is, will a thick-skinned raspberry be appealing to the consumer? And I'm not so sure there. 

And again, just another picture. There's three larvae right there. And again, people are very, very disappointed to see critters in their fruit. [LAUGHTER] And this is just a picture of cherries. Blueberries are potentially susceptible, but they got up here too late to be a problem with that. And you can see the kind of decay. And you know what they're doing is they're bringing their own yeast with them. I know that's what's happening here. And that's really what's causing the decay, and the fruit flies then are harvesting as the yeasts tend to go. Now, this is the bug that I used to think would guarantee Phil was going to retire. 

It still may be, but I have a little bit of good news. I like to give good news once in a while. This looks like the stinkbugs we all grew up with. We have four species of native brown stinkbugs in the state, and they really don't cause much of a problem. But this one is somewhat unique. It's called the brown marmorated stinkbug. And marmorated just refers to the kind of marbling brown and white color. But the way we identify it is three characters. It has these little white bands in the antennae. It has a shoulder that is smooth. 

Now, the only way you can get a good feel for that is if you look at our native stinkbugs, they have little teeth along that shoulder. So that is really a very easy character to see with any kind of magnification. And then they have this distinct banding. Now, the way I describe this insect to tell you what impact this has had out east where it has been established for about 12 to 15 years. Can you imagine what Japanese beetle does to your ornamental plants, what this does to your fruits and vegetables. And then the second part is that as an adult, it invades people's houses like Asian lady beetles do but is bigger and stinkier. So I've got two potential problems. The sheer numbers of the insects get to the point that those are literally pails full. And can you imagine? And when you disturb stinkbugs, the term comes from the fact that they have glands on their body and they exude a very pungent odor to defend themselves against birds and the like. So even after you Shop-Vac them, your house smells for about three days. 

And we're talking, literally, millions of them on the sides of houses invading the house, and just like Asian lady beetles and box elder bugs, all winter long some of them wake up and come out to have breakfast with you. So they're problematic from November all the way until April. So that makes it a major nuisance problem, a major structural problem, but as I mentioned, it also feeds on fruit. And at first you might think the damage is a sucking insect. It appears as little blemishes, but these blemishes will cause distinct off-flavors in fruits. And they feed on peppers, they feed on tomatoes, they feed on raspberries, they feed on strawberries, as I said. And because they feed on, they also cause quite a bit of problems on beans, in corn. So the records are, we had no activity of this insect until two years ago in the spring. I was at a conference and a pest control company that was there came up with some specimens from a hotel in the east side of Madison. They had gotten called in on one of the first warm days of spring because there was bugs crawling all over the outside of the hotel, and they had to come and spray for it. 

They were nice enough to collect specimens, and it was brown marmorated stinkbug. So that was our first official record. Since that time, I will tell you this past winter I saw a specimen out of Green Bay in somebody's house, I saw a specimen out of Middleton, Wisconsin, out of somebody's house, and I saw a specimen out of Jefferson where somebody found one in their garage. So they're here. What we have not seen yet is any kind of activity in the field. Whether crop consultants or fruit inspectors have not seen it. So, again, Phil's figuring, well, it's five to six years before it really hits the fan, we're about there in our career that we'll probably be gone. I've lived through Asian lady beetle, I've lived through earwigs, and I just know the kind of irritation they cause, and irritated people call the department, and if they call the department, they get me. [LAUGHTER] But the good news about the marmorated stinkbug, even though it has been very problematic in New Jersey and New York and Pennsylvania and Maryland and the like, this past July I was up in north of Shawano, Wisconsin, we had our Farm Technology Days and there was a farmer that came by, and he said last year I had to spray all my soy beans. He lives in Maryland. 

He said I had to spray all my soy beans, and his wife was there and she said, you know, those darn things ruined my Shop-Vac. There was so many of them that when I was sucking them in, they burned the motor out. And I'm commiserating with them because I know that's how that insect works when it really gets nasty. But then he turned to me and he says where are they? And I said what do you mean where are they? And he says I can't find any this year. They're just not there. And I said you're kidding. And he said no. So I get back and sure enough, I get on the internet and do a quick search for marmorated stinkbugs 2012. A number of reports out of Pennsylvania their populations are collapsing. And to be honest, we don't have an explanation. 

My gut feeling is that they're coming into a natural balance, whether it's a disease or a parasite that affects our normal stinkbugs have decided, hey, let's take care of the marmorated stinkbug. So I'm somewhat hopeful. We'll wait and see. When we get together, we have our national meetings in November so I'll get a chance to converse with some of my colleagues out east and see if they've got a theory for this. I did see one theory in the paper, and I'm always learning about theories in the paper. [LAUGHTER] That the person writing it thought maybe it was weather dependent. And I know it's been a weather extreme, but I can't believe that the weather has been so extreme that it stopped the stinkbugs from breeding. So we'll see where that one goes. Now, this creature, everybody knows this is a what? A mantid. Now, there are no native mantids to the Midwest. 

Occasionally, there are two species we would run into: the Chinese mantid, which is pictured here, and this one was captured in Madison last year, and this one called the European mantid. And the only way you can easily tell them apart is, do you see that little distinct black spot up on the foreleg? The European mantid has that, the Chinese mantid does not. Now, you may know as a gardener that you can buy the egg case of a mantid. It's called an ootheca. Looks like a golf ball, but it's kind of light and foamy. And you can buy these in the spring, and they will hatch and the little mantids will run around in your backyard and eat all kinds of things. And they do eat each other, unfortunately, too. But we had never had any evidence of mantids breeding in the state because we knew the problem is even though they were successful all summer long and they would mate, the egg cases would freeze out. It was just too cold in Wisconsin. Well, we are pretty well sure in the last 10 years that has changed. 

I will tell you I was at a Brewers game last year and a mantid landed on the gentleman in front of me. I was at a Badger game when they played Oregon State last summer or late summer, early fall, and a mantid went flying across the sky. This one was captured over by the Arboretum by my next door neighbor. We have breeding populations in the southern two-thirds of the state. In fact, I have seen about eight or nine samples already this year come in from around. And we also have a breeding population, this particular one was taken up in Door County. And the major significant difference, I think, is the lack of 25 below and all those temperatures that I seem to remember as quite commonplace as a kid that we just don't see any more. And so this is another example of something that's extending its range northward, and although they are not native insects, they are really kind of a neat thing to have around. So don't be surprised to see them. I've see them over on the parking ramp over by Russell Labs and they're out there. 

Now, this little bugger. This is the infamous emerald ash borer. The insect that will do to ash trees what Dutch elm disease did to elm trees as I was growing up. And, as you know, this insect was introduced into Michigan probably on pallet wood, infested that state for a number of years, maybe as much as 10 years before it was discovered, and by that time it had spread through a number of counties and it has been going gangbusters since. This was one of the first trees infested in Wisconsin. This was about five years ago now. This was over north of Milwaukee in Newburg area. And the reason that this problem was missed in Michigan is that there is a natural disease called verticillium that causes very similar symptoms. So when an ash was dying, we blamed it on the disease. Nobody dissected the tree to see that it had bugs in it. 

But once that was discovered, we found, indeed, as I said, this thing has spread. And the insect mines underneath the bark of the tree, completely girdling it, and then everything above that point dies. And it usually takes it two to three years to kill the tree. So things were kind of bopping along. We had an infestation north of Milwaukee. There's quite a bit of activity in Illinois, and so it wasn't surprising to see Kenosha and Racine and then Milwaukee get some positives. But as the summer progressed, we had only caught one beetle ever in Brown County. And I was up giving a lecture in Brown County at the Extension Office, and all of the sudden the agent pulled me aside and said somebody just walked in with an insect I want you to take a look at. And it was an emerald ash borer, and it was caught in downtown Green Bay, and the person who caught it didn't know it was an emerald ash borer. They just say this pretty green insect on their windshield. 

They wondered what the heck it was. Now, what was interesting is that was captured exactly where the beetle was caught and trapped two years previously. And now it's since been discovered a number of trees in downtown Green Bay are infested. Now, this happened on a Friday afternoon, and we have a protocol when we see an odd insect like that I have to get a hold of people at the Department of Ag and sometimes even the people from USDA. This one only Department of Ag. My conclusions is the end of the world is coming on a Friday afternoon because you can't get a hold of anybody on a Friday afternoon. [LAUGHTER] So the next Friday, I come in the lab and I get a call from an arborist in Waukesha County in Mequon. Excuse me, not Mequon, in Mukwonago. And I had worked with this arborist before, and arborists are old fashioned tree doctors. And when he said he though he had emerald ash borer, I assumed he's 100% right. 

There's no reason not to believe. And sure enough, it was. It was a Friday again, so now I'm trying to chase people around. So I'm starting to get a little gun shy on Fridays. The next week it wasn't Friday, it was Thursday night, when I saw a gentleman walking down the street I live on with a computer in his hand. And that gentleman happens to be Mike Maddox who is the county agent for Rock County down in Janesville. And I figure if Mike's coming to my house to show me something on a Thursday evening, this is not good. [LAUGHTER] And it turned out that that was the Janesville infestation. And also, we got one in Walworth County where they've got quite a bit of activity, and since those, we've also picked it up in Trempealeau County. So what I'm telling you is we have had at least four, and really five, verified county records this year. 

So it's starting to gain momentum. What's been the disappointment to me is the two previous years it stayed quiet. We saw further infestations in counties that had been infested, but we weren't seeing these new infestations. And so it's progressing. And what we tell people, it seems to be no matter how much we look for it and we train people, normally when we find it we discover it has been present for at least three to four years minimum before we find it. Part of the reason is that the outward symptoms in the first couple years are so subtle you can't expect anybody to pick it. It's only when the trees start to die and the woodpeckers are attacking to feed on the larvae and all those other things that it gets people's attention. So, this one will continue to progress. Now, the good news about this is if you have a favorite ash tree in your front yard, they can be protected. It will become a high maintenance issue. 

They have to be treated every year to every three years depending on what kind of treatment you decide to use. Where it's going to be a disappointment is out in the woods because you can't afford to treat those trees. And so ash in a native part of our forest is going to be a non-issue decades down the road. Japanese beetle. I tell the story, my mentor was Dr. Chuck Koval. And Chuck told me he wanted to retire before gypsy moth and Japanese beetle got established, and Chuck did and I never forgave him. [LAUGHTER] Because I knew, even though I had not experienced Japanese beetle, it was not going to deal with people with because there's very little I can tell you that in the long run is going to stop the problem because you have no control from where they're coming from. Now, this is my next door neighbor's rosebush. The only reason I know it's a rose is because I took the picture. But the good news about Japanese beetle, now, I live on the west side of Madison and one of the things I will tell you is Japanese beetle was a much bigger problem five to six years ago than it is now. 

Japanese beetle was first seen in the west side of Madison. There was a student at Toki Middle School that collected a Japanese beetle in his insect collection, I think it was about 1992. At those points when you see it, was it a hitchhiker, we still don't know. But that was the first records we had seen. Previously, this insect in Wisconsin, though, was established in Kenosha back in the 1960s and it died out on its own. And we blamed our blessed Wisconsin winter for that, but we were wrong. Populations started to flare in the '90s, late '90s, in significant numbers. I remember the first really significant population was down in Beloit where we got calls that somebody said something's eating everything in my yard. I just don't have insects that normally have that wide a host range. And I said, boy, please send me the insect, and when it showed up to be Japanese beetles, we got a hold of the Department of Ag, they went down there, and sure enough, the whole neighborhood. 

And what makes Japanese beetles problematic, it feeds on 300 varieties of plants, including grapes, raspberries, roses, birch trees, linden trees, purple leaf plum, crabapples, and a whole list after that. So, wide host range is quite unusual. They start to show up towards the end of June, and they're still out there now if you go look for them. So you've got at least two months of misery. But really where the biggest problem comes is they're flying from down the road. They are not breeding in your yard. So it's not as simple as something you could do to your lawn to kill the grubs because they tend to be found in turf areas because most of the sources are down the road. And my source is the golf course. It's two blocks away. In golf course environments, my colleague Chris Williamson can find densities of 60 to 100 per square foot, on average. 

So you think of the sheer number of insects and then they come flying off and that's where you've got the holy war to deal with. But here's where the good news comes from: this graph is shared to me by Dr. Phil Barak, who's a soil scientist. And Phil has a trap, and if you read our information, we tell you don't put traps in your yard because that makes it worse rather than better. We know that from the data from east of us where the people have been dealing with it since 1912 when it first got established in New Jersey. But Phil doesn't care. He's a scientist. He knows what each beetle weighs. He weighs his traps every night, and he graphs his data. And what he has here is a graph that explains exactly what I've seen in my front yard on the west side of Madison: a dramatic drop in the populations for a majority of the last two years. And the only big upswing that we see here is in 2011, and I could make the argument the reason there was so many beetles in 2011 is because it rained so much in 2010. 

So there was much better breeding habitat. In my own yard, which tends to be pretty low maintenance, I average about three beetles per square foot. So that's not problematic, but 60 in the golf course is. Now, he shared with me the data from this year, and I haven't seen the final data, and he was getting a little nervous because 2012 you notice it was the biggest jump we've seen, but I will tell you basically what I expect when I see the rest of it, it's going to flatline. They came out about 10 days early because of the warm conditions in the soil. Their population has pushed but it's been a trickle ever since then. Now, Japanese beetle has made it north of Eau Claire up into Barron County in Wisconsin on the west side of the state. They made it north of Green Bay up into Oconto County. And Green Bay and Appleton, where they've only been for three to four years, people were just like we were 10 years ago in Madison saying god, this is a terrible insect and what are we going to do about it? But, what we would expect, and this is something that was evidenced in the states east of us, is their populations will come down. They won't go away so I'm not going to say it's easy to grow roses, but they're definitely not near as problematic as they have been in the past, and I expect that to continue. 

And if I had to make a wild guess for next year with the drought conditions we had, which means there's less suitable habitat, less Japanese beetles. So that's good news. Now, another artifact, I tell my students the number one pest, bless you, the number one pest of everything in California is spider mites. When you get hot, dry weather, we get spider mites. And so you have picked up the discussions about farmers fighting spider mites in their soy bean fields, and you cannot present a plant to me that I would be surprised if it got spider mites. So this is a raspberry that's infested with spider mites. The symptoms are very subtle because the mites are extremely small, but it's a bronzing or a peppering of the leaves, and they will eventually dry. This is maybe a little bit more typical of what I see. This is somebody's bean plant. The symptom is called stippling, but the way I define spider mite damage is the equivalent of taking a piece of sandpaper and going like this on the leaf. 

There's so much physical abrasion by their feeding that that leaf is going to dry. And that leaf cannot recover from that kind of feeding. Now, the normal pattern if you get a decent rain once every week or two, it washes them off the plants and they're not successful. So if we get a normal summer, we don't have spider mites. But when it doesn't rain for five or six weeks, we get them. And so that's why they had thrived. The trouble is there's a delay sometimes in the plants showing the symptoms. So, when we started getting the bit of rain that we got in the end of July and a little bit of cooler weather, honestly I've seen the spider mite populations take a significant natural decline because of the weather But that doesn't mean the plants aren't still browning out. And so that's what some people are experiencing. Now, they get the term spider mite because at times they will create a webbing but not all the time. 

And if you look very carefully, on the edges of the leaves what looked to be little walking dust, those are the mites themselves. They're about 1/50 of an inch in size, and, honestly, without a microscope they're very difficult to see. Although, the symptoms we suggest to folks, if you're ever suspicious you've got them is take a white piece of paper, shake the plant and shake it pretty good because you need to dislodge them, and if the dust starts to walk, you've got spider mites. [LAUGHTER] Very problematic. To be honest, if you decide to use most garden insecticides against this, you make them worse, not better. They are resistant to most insecticides, and what we find is that the few predators that are out there are susceptible. So when you spray, in fact the way I could promote spider mites on plants is to spray them about four times a year with a general insecticide. And I almost can guarantee the mites will thrive under those conditions. They are susceptible to soapy water, though. Soaps kill more as a physical contact. 

And maybe you don't even need the soap. I honestly find sometimes to just get out there and hose the plants off once every couple weeks is more than sufficient. This, to be honest, is a plant in my own garden. This is on the east side of our house, and it's next to the garage where we have an overhang. And I don't care how hard it rains, wherever it rains, these never get forceful water. So I have spider mites there every year. Unfortunately, my wife has to put up with me doing my little experiments on this side, but this is one case, even though we've all been taught when you water plants, water at the base, we don't want excess moisture on the leaves that promote plant diseases. That is true but this is a case where every once in a while, to be honest, you get a great benefit if it's been hot and dry. The other thing you witness in your own yards is it's the southern exposures, the ones that tend to get the most drought it gets the biggest mites problems. You can get the same plant underneath in a shaded area and they don't see the mites. 

Another interesting experience with spider mites, I will guarantee you about the second week of November to the second week of December I'll get a bunch of calls from people who had this lovely plant out on their deck that never showed any symptoms and any problems. They bring it into the house and all the sudden the mites explode within four or five weeks. Well, what's the change of environment? Well, it definitely doesn't rain in the house. But also what's happening in November is our furnaces are coming on and the humidity drops. We're getting into California weather. That's what kicks the mites up. And this is somebody's delphinium. And that's about as impressive a spider mite population you can get. They webbed everything over and the flowers will not develop, but the rest of the plant was desiccating. So, been a fantastic year for spider mites. 

They're always there, it's just that normally the conditions are right for their populations to thrive. Then the last one I wanted to share with you is just kind of a fun one. This is a caterpillar. A pink caterpillar, at least I think it's pink. And it was sent to me by a gentleman up in Hudson, Wisconsin. And I'll tell you one of the delights in my career is the number of references, general references that have become available. And there are two very good books on caterpillars that are available. And the trouble is, though, is this critter wasn't in either one of them, and so Phil had to do a little bit more digging. Now, the way I tend to cheat on this is to do a search on caterpillars found on milkweed, or this was butterfly weed which is a type of milkweed. It turns out to be another one of my southern moths. 

In this particular species, it is a type of tiger moth. And I was a little suspicious because tiger moths tend to be pretty fuzzy in the caterpillar stage, and this critter definitely was. But I have not seen this insect to be very common, although when we did check we did have some references, you do see it in some prairie barrens in the state because some of our host plants are a little bit more common there. It does not have a common name. The genus is Cycnia, C-Y-C-N-I-A. And, again, this is definitely the farthest north we've ever recorded in this state. And this, again, is one of those delightful samples that without somebody's digital camera I don't think I ever would have seen because nobody would have ever taken the bother to put it in the mailing container and send it down to Phil. And half the time when they send them to Phil, to be honest, they are insect pancakes. [LAUGHTER] I really am amazed how efficient the postal service is at crushing things. [LAUGHTER] But that does make it somewhat problematic, unfortunately, to identify insects. 

But when you can get a nice picture like this, usually it gives me enough to work with that I can go from there. So, with that, I guess I'd be more than happy to open it up to questions. Anything and everything I will try to answer. One of the fun things about what I do, you might think I'm a rather specialized scientist, but in my own department, to be honest, I'm as close to a generalist as there is. So I work with ticks and ants and things on vegetables and things on crops and, unfortunately, bedbugs which is a problem becoming more problematic. And I'd love you to see my grandson, but I think it's time to get him off. [APPLAUSE]