UGA Vegetables Podcast Episode 7

Vegetable entomologist Dr. Stormy Sparks discusses cotton jassid, a new invasive insect pest on vegetables. The episode covers insect identification, plant damage, hopper burn symptoms, and management strategies, including insecticides and new product registrations. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Welcome everyone to the University of Georgia Vegetables Podcast. I'm your co-host, Incas Alter, Vegetable and Cotton Intelligence UTA.

SPEAKER_03 0:19

I'm your other co-host, Dr. Ted McBoy, Vegetable Extension Specialist here at the University of Georgia Fifty Campus. So the purpose of this podcast is to bring South Georgia vegetable growers and vegetable growers across the southeastern United States timely information about planting, pest control, and crop management. And if you're interested, hey everyone, it's the second week of September 2025, and we have our entomologist Stormy Spark. Stormy, is there any bug problems that we're having right now that you want to talk about?

SPEAKER_00 0:54

There's always bug problems. This time of year, normally what we're talking about is white fly. And white fly is bad. It's really gotten worse in the last, I'd say, three weeks. Yeah, they've been really building, and viruses, of course, has shown up, so that it'll spread very rapidly as well. But really, the the uh newest pest we're trying to deal with is the two-spotted cotton leaf hopper or cotton jacid, which is an invasive pest and is pretty much spread throughout South Georgia and largely through the southeast. I was just talking with Philip Roberts a few minutes ago, and then the last few days they've found it from North Carolina all the way over to Texas.

SPEAKER_03 1:52

So just a little history on on this pest is last year we saw it in North Florida. We were on alert thinking maybe we might see it in South some South Georgia counties. Yeah. We've seen it about um the second week of July in Georgia, and now it's pretty much in every cotton field.

SPEAKER_00 2:11

Yeah, in in July, early July, you know, we didn't know we had it. We found it in okra first because it's it affects the okra very severely. You get very large populations and it can kill large plantings of okra. And that's where it showed up first. It was probably here a little earlier than that. But you know, you we were thinking, oh, we'll see a few here and there this year, maybe. Hopefully not. Hopefully it wouldn't overwinter and whatnot. But you know, shortly after that, if you looked for it, you could find it in most in a lot of the cotton fields and in pretty much any okra patch. And and now, like I said, that's uh, you know, we knew we had it throughout South Georgia this last month and into into South Carolina. But some of it, some of the more recent finds have been associated with ornamentals shipped out of Florida. I think you were mentioning. Ours was just natural movement and and then populations building up during the year.

SPEAKER_01 3:07

It's moving from field to field.

SPEAKER_00 3:09

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

So any other vegetable crops that does get impacted by the case.

SPEAKER_00 3:14

As far as vegetables are concerned, okra is the one that's most severely impacted. Uh, and part of that may be because we don't tend to spray okra a lot, so they can build up. The other crop that's usually mentioned is eggplant. Uh, and and they supposedly like eggplant, eggplants severely impacted. And this is, it's it has an extremely wide host range, like a lot of plant hoppers do. It's you can probably find it on pretty much anything green, but it's kind of like broadmite. Broadmite is on everything, it was on a lot of different crops, but the only two crops respond negatively to its feeding. And that's kind of like this jasid. The two vegetables that respond most negative are okra and eggplant.

SPEAKER_03 3:56

You said it it kills okra, so it causes hopper burn, which is basically turns the margins brown and yellow. Yeah. And it just looks like it got burnt up by drought or with curling leaves.

SPEAKER_00 4:09

Yep. It starts it starts out yellowing and then you'll get reddish coloring in the leaf, and then it'll turn brown, and then they just, you know, they die and drop leaves drop off. And like I said, in okra, I've seen okra killed by it. Uh, cotton, if you drive around South Georgia right now, you'll see a lot of cotton fields where there's areas that look like it's been defoliated or getting ready to be defoliated, and other spots in the field are still green, and that's that's from the cotton jazzet or the leaf hopper. It's that hopper burn.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

So is the symptoms the same? Like what we see in cotton, it's kind of similar in the open as well.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

Yeah, as far as I can tell, the symptoms are very similar. I really we really haven't seen a whole lot in as far as symptoms in eggplant. I've been in some eggplant fields where I know we have jasid and we've had jasid for at least three weeks, but they haven't built up and become a problem yet. And I think what is happening, and I hope what is happening, is that because we spray for white fly this time of year and we tend to spray a lot for white fly, a lot of the products that we use for white fly also impact the leaf hopper. So hopefully what we're already doing for white fly is going to keep the leaf hopper at bay. But that that just remains to be seen. And then if it overwinters, which we assume it overwintered last year, it's very unlikely that it got distributed this widely in Georgia, which is movement up during the summer. It probably overwintered last year, probably brought in by the hurricane or something like that, and then populations built up spraying into going into summer. If it overwinters, our big question will be what will it do to our particularly eggplant in the spring when we're not spraying white fly? Is this something we're gonna have to start treating for on a regular basis?

SPEAKER_01 5:58

Could you tell us about some of the pesticides and insecticides that would work against jacet?

SPEAKER_00 6:06

Yeah. The there's differences among even within a group, within the neonicotinoids, there's differences as to what how they work, but they all impact the jazzet, is what we're at least seeing. Typically, venom is the one that for whatever reason works a little better than some of the others. But as long as you've got a new neonicotoid in there, you're probably you know beating them down somewhat. Uh Courier, in one test that Philip Roberts, Philip Roberts has done a lot of work with this pest because it's a cotton pest and they've had it in cotton for you know a month now, and he's done a lot of different efficacy studies. And courier has worked very well, particularly you know, obviously for primarily for immature since it's a growth regulator. And then a variety of other things will you know will at least slow it down. Uh, but probably the neonictinoids are what would play the biggest role in vegetables. The group 28s, which we also use for white flies, the XRL coragin, have not shown us as much activity on the Jacid. So you wouldn't want to have a straight group 28 program for white flies, which you shouldn't have anyway for resistance management. But if you keep that neonicotoid in there, uh it seems to work uh fairly well, pretty well, and and for an extended period.

SPEAKER_03 7:26

You know, I heard you say bydrin before that. That might be a neonicotinoid.

SPEAKER_00 7:30

Uh yeah, we don't say bidron in vegetable meetings. Okay. Bydrin is a that's a cotton one. It's a cotton product. It's strictly cotton. It's pretty toxic stuff to deal with, also. So we don't tend to use it in vegetable. And they're getting reports now of people that have used bydrin for Jacid. We knew this was gonna happen. You start spraying bydrin or any organophosphate or carbamate, and you're gonna flare white flies. So those people that have tried to go the cheaper route using bodrine, uh, you know, some of them are gonna pay the price down the road because they're gonna be fighting white flies worse than they when they should have.

SPEAKER_03 8:06

And then it might have been a one-off, but I also heard you say malathion, I believe, at one point.

SPEAKER_00 8:11

Malathione in in uh the first bioassay, one of the first bioassays I did, uh, Malethion actually looked very good in in the bioassay. It gave us pretty good mortality. Uh, I know there's a bunch of ochre home ochre growers. That was the concern is a homeowner, what can they get hold of? What can they use that might work? Usually they're using a pyrethroids. Pyrethroids do little or nothing for the jazzet. So we looked at some other products and malathine and that one bioassay look pretty good. Now I sprayed Dr. McAvoy's regrowth okra uh last week with a couple of products, belief and venom. Both look very, very good. The malathine that I sprayed today, you really can't tell that it did a whole lot. So it may very well be that it knocks them back pretty well, but they're able to rebound. But on, you know, if you're that's this is spraying some areas and not spraying others, so they're gonna, you know, small plots, they're gonna rebound a lot easier. So it may be that for a homeowner still, I think what I've been told from some of the county agents that are dealing with homeowned products and okra and they're spraying mallathione said they're getting very good control.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

Dr. Sparks, how would homeowners diagnose Jasset?

SPEAKER_00 9:28

Well, if if you're dealing with okra, it's pretty obvious. When they when it's when that plant starts turning yellow, uh you look on the leaf, turn them over uh about the probably fourth, fifth leaf down from the terminal. They're not you can find them right in the terminal, but they tend to be a little bit lower on the plant. It's a tiny green leaf hopper. It's it's a narrow, skinny, greenish insect. It's maybe three-eighths of an inch long. Uh there's a lot of leaf hoppers, a potato leaf hopper you'll see in a lot of gardens as well. But this one has a black spot at the basically at the tip of each wing. So if you look at it the head back, back towards the rear, you'll see the two black spots on the wings. That's not really easy to see. They're very quick, but if you get if you get them, particularly if you get under magnification, the spots are very open.

SPEAKER_01 10:21

And they can always go to their local extension agent.

SPEAKER_00 10:25

Absolutely, yeah. If you've got questions about it, if you've got concerns about it, uh particularly if you can collect some, just take them into your extension agent. And if they can't identify them, they can get them to me.

SPEAKER_01 10:36

Search UGA extension, if you would like to find out who's your extension agent. Search UGA extension on your county, it's a bigger one.

SPEAKER_00 10:43

So I'm used to I'm used to dealing with vegetable growers, commercial vegetable growers, and they all know who their county agent is. And they have his number or her number.

SPEAKER_03 10:52

So I see you have a stack of papers ahead of you with Pestilar. Is that just study material or is there um some regulatory or not?

SPEAKER_00 11:01

There's nothing regulatory yet. There's discussion about it. Like you said, the a lot of the finds, this most recent finds in like Texas and some of these other states distant from where we knew it may have overwintered, uh, have been associated with hibiscus that were uh shipped out of a state to the south of us that will remain nameless. And that's you know, at least that as far as I've been told, that nursery has been quarantined as far as shipping out of state those crops. That's a big concern for us as well in the vegetable industry because we grow a lot of you know transplants and ship them into a variety of areas. So, you know, we we'll have to make sure that we keep those clean or that they're clean when they leave the state. Um there's what's going to happen regulatorily, we we don't know at this point. It's it'll be wait and see.

SPEAKER_03 11:54

Well, I hate that we have something new, but it sounds like there's a lot of research that we're having, you know, doing the best we can and having some positive findings.

SPEAKER_02 12:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:05

And and there's there's uh there's a lot of information out there because this has been a pest in other countries. It's probably originally from India. They've been battling it for a for a lot of years. Dr. Roberts is uh was on a phone call with the cotton commission and some entomologists in India last week. And you know, from what we're hearing, this could be devastating to the cotton industry. Uh, it's a very severe pest. It can be a pest on seedlings, uh, you know, throughout it right up through the season. And you know, cotton is already fairly low price right now. If you if you're barely making money or not making money, you really don't need to be spending a lot more money on a new pest.

SPEAKER_01 12:51

Is there a way to report if you detect Jacet? Is there a formal survey program, especially for vegetables, that is ongoing right now?

SPEAKER_00 13:00

We don't really have a survey program for it, uh, other than just the ri initially it was just do you have with the county agents, do you have it in your county? Uh and you know, we went from like nine uh known counties infested one day. We had a district meeting where Dr. Roberts talked about this thing, and two days later we had 25 counties. It's basically as a matter of just going out there and looking. Because the populations were very low, there weren't any big problems at that point, but they were obviously very widespread, other than the fact that they're very widespread, you know, as far as looking in crops or whatnot, that consultants are are well aware of this problem at this point, uh, particularly in the cotton world, vegetable world is is um should be aware of it, should be watching for it. They know, particularly in Georgia, uh we're we're trying to watch the eggplant uh crop pretty closely because that's that's the one that's most likely to be to be uh damaged on a on a large scale. Okra. It's backyard stuff. Anybody's growing okra, a lot of that's backyard stuff. Anybody that's growing okra's probably already got it and they know they've got it and they've been damaged, but the eggplant is a is a lot of acreage, a lot of value, so we're keeping a close eye on that.

SPEAKER_03 14:23

You know, there was maybe some concern, and we'll be on standby, I suppose, of what happens when they harvest all the cotton. You know, would it have a preference, but also just the need to survive, feed on other stuff.

SPEAKER_00 14:36

Yeah, when they when they defoliate cotton, undoubtedly they're going to be large populations moving. So it's you know, that's gonna be real interesting to see whether or not, you know, hopefully it's not like white fly, where you end up with two, three hundred per leaf on some crops, because I don't know that we've got an insecticide program that could stand up to that with this particular pest. Unfortunately, we may find out in the next month or so. It's just it depends on where you are, what what the cotton growers have done as far as control. I mean, you can drive around South Georgia now and you'll see some fields that are just green and pretty as they can be, some fields that have dead spots or spots on the edge, and and you know that's probably jazzed.

SPEAKER_03 15:20

I was riding around with a county agent, Tucker Price, and um he was talking to another agent, Ben Reeves, and they were saying that there's chemical shortage. Have you heard of that?

SPEAKER_00 15:32

That maybe people are Yeah, so some products, if you you've got products that work well, that's an issue that that uh the industry is going to have to deal with, particularly with cotton. You know, if if we get a new pest and vegetables and we've got to spray twice as much as we used to spray, we don't tend to run into shortages because you double whatever we've got, that's not that bad. But if you put one or two sprays on, you know, a million acres or only half the cotton, 500,000 acres of cotton, that uses a lot of product in a hurry. So yeah, there there is some concern for product potential product shortages. Now, a lot of these products are that we use are kind of expensive for cotton growers too. So they're not, you know, they're not going to spray unless they have to. Uh and because they just don't, the economics aren't the same in cotton as they are in on in a lot of our vegetables. That's right. So we're not competing for the same product.

SPEAKER_01 16:30

You have any update on ESA? Endangered species act.

SPEAKER_00 16:35

Yeah, the Endangered Species Act. We're fixing to all get to uh Dr. Culpepper's been very familiar with that because of the herbicides that were registered and had had all of that regulation associated with them. Where hopefully we'll be getting the new product, Cyngena product that uh it was ISM 555. Yeah, it was ISM 555, and I still can't I haven't committed the trade name. There's five trade names for it, or gonna be five trade names for it. Where hopefully we'll get that product registered uh in the next month or so. We were expecting it, you know, August or September. We're in September, so maybe we'll get it. But undoubtedly that's gonna have a lot of this Endangered Species Act regulations associated with it. So you will have to do very similar to what they've done with the aux and herbicides. If you're gonna use it, you've got to look at where you're using it, when you're using it, how you're using it, whether or not there's additional regulations other than what's already on the label, you've got to go in and check the the website, the the EPA website. For your application area. For your application area, see if there's additional restrictions, you're gonna have to get points. Uh, you know, unfortunately, most of Georgia's you get two points for being in Georgia. So, you know, if if the product only requires two points, we're good. If it requires four points, then you've got to look at okay, how am I spraying? Am I using large droplets? Am I spraying, you know, within uh two foot of the canopy, things like that. You get points for different things that you can do to reduce the potential for drift, basically. And and these new labels, and it's gonna happen with everything eventually. Everything has to get re-registered at some point, and when it gets re-registered, it will have the Endangered Species Act regulations associated with it. So this is something growers are gonna have to get used to doing. You're gonna have to look up to see what kind of restrictions occur, what time of year do they occur, how many points do I need, do I have those points. Fortunately, in many cases, if we can keep the point systems, you know, if if the industry can keep the points required low, you don't have to look up points every time you spray. If you've if you only need two points and you know you've got two points because you're in South Georgia, you don't have to look up to see if you got the points, you know you've got it made. So you just, you know, you look at your farm, you do it field by field, but you but you can kind of do your farm all at one time, hopefully, and figure out how many points you have. And if you run into a product where you need new points, then you more points, then you work on that. But hopefully, for most of them, you know, you'll do this one time and just keep records of I've got these, this is how I've got the points, and and it covers me for these insecticides or pesticides.

SPEAKER_03 19:31

So with the endangered species act, anything that's registered or re-registered and every product has to be re-registered periodically, they're gonna have new regulations that um reduce the environmental impact, particularly to endangered species, and that these points that you're talking about will reduce the burden and allow you to apply on your fields.

SPEAKER_00 19:54

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 19:55

And you know, so one bright spot that you mentioned is a new product. That doesn't happen every day.

SPEAKER_00 20:00

It's it hasn't happened in the entomology world, it hasn't happened in at least three years.

SPEAKER_03 20:05

And that product that you're talking about, this ingenta product, from what I've seen, it looks like it's it's good on many pests. Yeah, diamonds.

SPEAKER_00 20:12

It's it's a broad spectrum product. Uh it should help us with a lot of problems. Uh diamondback moth is one of them. It's shown very good efficacy there. It's a new mode of action, so there's no cross-resistance with anything, no, no known resistance at this point. Now, undoubtedly, diamondback moth will develop resistance. Uh, but hopefully it'll be at least two, three years. If if we use the product properly, it'll be longer than that. But it helps with diamondback moth. It's good on thrips, which really we don't have a lot of products that are good on thrips. Uh it's good on it's reported to be good on spider mites. That's one I haven't really looked at, hadn't had the opportunity to look at it, but it's supposed to be very good on spider mites. Uh Philip Roberts has said it's good on stink bugs. We really don't have anything good on stink bugs. We've we've got things that beat them back, okay. But uh yeah, this is this product is one that should help us in a lot of areas.

SPEAKER_03 21:10

And I think maybe I've heard you say weevil.

SPEAKER_00 21:12

Pepper weevil, yes. Cowpea Coculeo, no. Okay, no. And it's and surprisingly, it is not it, it hasn't looked very good on white fly either. So that's one that would always be nice. It would be nice to have something that worked on everything, you know, so that you go out there and spray your your spray for a weevil and you're controlling caterpillars and white flies all at the same time with one product, but that just doesn't tend to happen very much anymore.

SPEAKER_01 21:41

How about Jasset?

SPEAKER_00 21:43

The Jasset, uh yes, there's been some reports that it that it's got some good efficacy on Jasset as well. It didn't, I looked at it in the in a bioassay in the in the lab, it didn't look that good, but it's because the mode of action is slow. You know, bioassays are great for things that have quick knockdown. If you've got something that takes three or four days to kill and you're doing your evaluation at two days, obviously it doesn't look very good in those situations. But I think Philip Roberts has looked at it, I know, and some other people in the field, and it's it's it's looked very promising.

SPEAKER_01 22:15

Price-wise, is it pretty competitive as well?

SPEAKER_00 22:17

No earthly idea. Not till when the first jug hits the market, we'll know what the price is.

SPEAKER_01 22:24

Moving on to peppers and tomatoes, for the fall season, we are almost halfway through right now.

SPEAKER_00 22:29

Well, I'll jump in real quick on peppers because you said peppers made me think about it. Right now, uh broadmites are starting to build. They like a little cooler weather, and we've gotten a little cooler weather now. They don't like this dryness, uh, but they like cooler weather, humid. Uh, and they have started, I've had some reports that they're starting to show up in peppers now. And this is usually about the time of year that they show up. So uh any pepper growers out there should be looking for broad mites.

SPEAKER_03 22:58

And you want to apply agromecan Oberon as far as Oberon if you're doing it preventatively.

SPEAKER_00 23:06

Uh Oberon's a good choice. It's slow. It's not a good choice if you've already got a problem that's built up and you need to knock them back because it's it's really slow. But if you can put it out a little more preventatively, it's an excellent product. It'll help you with white flies as well. Uh, where if you've got an established population, you're looking more at like AgriMec, Portal, uh, some of those other products, that and they're more they're more selective. They pretty much work on mites and not much else.

SPEAKER_01 23:38

You want to talk about diagnosing?

SPEAKER_00 23:40

As far as uh broad mites, what usually occurs is people find damage first. And at that point, they've been there probably two weeks. Uh, but the reason you don't find them earlier than that is you've got to pull leaves really to make sure you go you got you really need at least a 20x lens. Uh I need better than that because my eyes aren't that good anymore. But uh, you really need to take them back into the lab and look at them and and look for the eggs. That's the easiest thing to identify because the eggs are kind of clear and look like they're speckled. Uh and that tells you you've got broad mite. But usually you'll find damage in peppers, pull the terminal and look right in the terminal. When that terminal opens up and that leaf starts expanding, those mites are moving back up to the terminal already. So that's where you in peppers you look right in the terminal. In eggplant, if you ever look at an eggplant terminal, man, it's nothing but a mass of hairs and they're not in there. They're down on about the fourth or fifth leaf from the terminal. Uh so you got to know where to look to find them as well.

SPEAKER_01 24:47

Do the symptoms caused by them uh are diagnosable, unique, or yeah, they're they're pretty unique.

SPEAKER_00 24:54

I mean, they it looks like virus, uh particularly in peppers. Uh it looks like virus, uh, or it could look like herbicide injury. So that's why you've got to find those mites to verify what it is. Uh, and one of the things you get with with the broad mite in pepper is the main vein gets a kind of squiggly-esh shape to it. Uh, that'll that'll tell you that's more than likely it's broad mite. An eggplant, you know, again, you get kind of virus-like symptoms. If you if you get fruit that's that's um reacting to it, you get yellow or greenish streaks in it, or particularly up around the calyx. You can get a little bit of russeting. Um, but yeah, the the damage is is somewhat characteristic, but you really need to find those, find the eggs to verify that that's what you're dealing with. And one of the problems also with broad mite is because it's it's a toxin or something in the saliva when they're feeding that causes that plant reaction. That can continue to occur for a week or two after you control the the problem. So it's it's just a difficult pest to deal with because it's so tiny, it causes severe problems in those two crops, and it's it's not just direct feeding that's that's the issue.

SPEAKER_01 26:17

So you talked about the for pepper, what we should watch out for as the season progresses. Um how about for tomato and cucumber here?

SPEAKER_00 26:26

Yeah, cucumber probably our biggest thing is is still white flies. I mean, they're gonna they're they can be devastating, just sheer numbers. Uh you I'm going out and collecting white flies off different crops. Uh, you know, some crops you go in there and it takes you a while to collect two or three hundred. You go into a cucumber field and you can get two or three hundred off a leaf. Uh so white flies are probably the biggest thing. There's some caterpillar pests that can get in there, but but white flies are probably our biggest issue right in in cucumbers right now. In fact, in a lot of crops.

SPEAKER_03 27:01

Tomato, all the cucurbic crops and and beans. You know, they tend to be a problem all clear up till November unless we get a major weather system, like a hurricane type system or large rain, widespread rain event.

SPEAKER_00 27:15

Yeah, widespread rain, you know, the the typical rains we get in the summer, late summer, that's spotty. Uh it does a little bit to them, but not much. It's when we get a tropical system, hopefully with very little or no wind. That's right. Uh, we we uh knock the adult population down pretty good. It it can bounce back fairly rapidly, but that really slows them down. And then what really slows them down is when we get cold at night. We don't, you know, we're not looking for a freeze, but when it gets really cool at night, that life cycle really stretches out, and we just, you know, we don't have as much a problem. Uh right now we're spraying, you know, growers are spraying it probably twice a week at least, just because there's white flies moving around so much in the environment. When they slow down, you know, you can spray and you can really tell that you knock the adults back and it takes them a little while to bounce back.

SPEAKER_01 28:12

Me and Ted were talking about this a little earlier. The zoning, you know, USDA has growing zones, right? And Georgia used to be eight, South Georgia, eight B. Now recently in the last year or the year and a half, uh they changed it to 9A. But maybe because of this increasing temperature, do you think the white fly population issues were is higher now than it used to be?

SPEAKER_00 28:39

Uh it's higher potential. Higher potential. I I would agree with that. David Riley even looked at that probably oh five years or more ago. And he was looking, he was looking at degree days and how many generations white flies could go through in a year. And it's gone from like twelve to sixteen. It's you know, it it doesn't take a huge change to add a generation or two. Uh particularly, you know, if you've got a you know, early spring or or or late winter, you you can squeeze in an extra generation or two fairly easily. And that's I think that absolutely has happened over the years. I think some other pests have responded to that as well. Uh something like squash bug. 10-15 years ago, I never saw squash bug. Uh it's a common occurrence now. There, and you know, then it started being a problem every spring, and now it's stretched to where it's spring and fall pretty much every year. You can find squash bug year-round. Uh, I was doing some work the other day and picking up boards around the farm, and there's squash bugs under every board you pick up. There are they're already going into overwintering. It seems like it's kind of early for that, uh, but they're already going into overwintering sites.

unknown 30:03

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 30:03

Yeah, a lot of the invasive pests that are coming out. Jasset is one of them, right? We've been talking about you know, some of the Asian vegetables that are more adapted to this increased temperature and maybe originate from some of these places where these invasive pests are coming from, and may have some potential here in Georgia.

SPEAKER_03 30:25

So, this is our grant proposal between between the increased market demand and maybe with the plant co-evolving with the pest, they could have some resistance. So that's what we're gonna do.

SPEAKER_00 30:37

Yeah, yeah. And that's one of this jazz, that's one of the things they learned in in uh India is that all of the cottons they grow have jazzed resistance or some some level of resistance. Um, but it also they said that it breaks through the jazz breaks the resistance about every two or three years. So they're constantly having to introduce new resistant varieties in order to be able to grow cotton just because of the jazz. So that's that's got a lot of people in in the cotton world uh very interested in what's going to happen in the in the in the future with this pest.

SPEAKER_01 31:15

You know, for uh tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers, you mentioned that they may not be a big problem there. Is that because the work they've done over in India or other places, it showed that it's not it's a host but doesn't respond negatively.

SPEAKER_00 31:31

Yeah, that's and that's not that's not hold on to say it's common. It's it's not uncommon uh for that to occur with some some pests that have very wide host range. There's there's even though they've got a very wide host range, they have specific crops that they strongly prefer. Or in this case, I think it's very much like I said, the with the broadbite, where it's just there's specific crops that respond negatively uh to their feeding, much more so than feeding on you know the same population on another crop doesn't cause that level of damage. The hopper burn and yeah, it just doesn't cause that hopper burn.

SPEAKER_01 32:09

But then if you're rotating with those negatively affected plants, then you're just building up the well, yeah, and that's the other thing.

SPEAKER_00 32:17

Even if you've got eggplant next to whatever else they might be on, if you you gotta manage them in that other crop as well so that they don't move to your eggplant. Yeah. But again, with most vegetables, I don't think that's a huge concern because we're we're treating pretty much everything green for white flies, with the except possible exception of sweet corn. Uh so we'll we'll see how that works out. I'm I'm hoping that we're really not gonna add a whole lot as far as management just because we are so heavily right now uh managing white fly. It'll be interesting to see what though happens in the spring, if this pest is able to build up rapidly into spring or not, or if it's gonna be very much like white fly where it's a annual fall event.

SPEAKER_01 33:06

How does it overwinter, right?

SPEAKER_00 33:08

Don't know. I got some adults and put them in the freezer for a relatively short period and killed them. But they supposedly overwinter everywhere in India that they grow cotton. It's it's far north for India, it's probably about equal with us, isn't it? As far as is so I would I'm afraid they probably overwintered here last year in very low populations. Um but that's something we're you know, again, we're waiting to see just what happened. We can play with them as far as what temperatures will kill them and whatnot. And I don't it doesn't take that low of a temperature to kill an adult or immature, I can already tell you. But those those also were not insects that were prepared for overwintering. That's that's the other thing that can happen with the insects is is the physiology can change as they're going into overwintering uh stages, and they may be dark more able to withstand those temperatures. But and they go into protective sites, you know, like squash bugs. Squash bugs overwinters adults at protective sites, and and that may be part of what they're doing here as well. Again, we we got a lot to learn yet.

SPEAKER_01 34:19

What's problematic is last winter was one of our strongest winters.

SPEAKER_00 34:24

It was pretty it was pretty cold, but we also during some of the coldest periods we had snow on the ground, which is an insulator. So yeah, you're you know, you get down below 32, but the snow's keeping that plant, that area in that 32 range. So that's that may have helped some, but I I suspect probably not. I suspect they're probably in because I don't think they're big pest in grains or anything. And again, we'll wait, we'll we'll find out. We'll be watching all of this very closely, monitoring it from from here through next year. Well, it's always a pleasure, Dr. Clark. I wish it was always informal.

SPEAKER_03 35:07

I know I we have three of them. We want to be like you and me. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you next time.