Effect of Ground Cover Management on Predators and Predation of Halyomorpha halys in Georgia Peach Orchards

View the project final report

Commodities

• Fruits: peaches

Practices

• Pest Management: biological control, cultural control, integrated pest management

Brown marmorated stink bug (BMSB) (Halyomorpha halys) is an invasive stink bug that causes damage to multiple fruit and vegetable commodities across the world, including peaches. In addition to this invasive pest, peach growers in the Southeastern US must contend with a variety of other established insect pests. Currently, there are few integrated pest management tactics available for managing insect pests in peach production. However, there is increasing research evaluating the use of insect natural enemies to biologically suppress pests, but many of those projects focus on parasitic wasps and/or predators of eggs. In Chinese peach production, one cultural control tactic for managing insect pests is to manipulate the plants grown in the ground cover between the peach trees. With several of the insect pests of peaches in the Southeastern US, including BMSB, potentially spending part of their life cycle on the ground, we were interested in testing whether ground cover management can impact the insect predator community within peach orchards and subsequently the diet of these predators. As such, we used a combination of pitfall traps and molecular gut content analysis to identify ground-dwelling predators of common peach pests and we evaluated how ground typical cover management practices used in the Southeastern US can impact natural enemies and their diet.

1. To identify the predators of BMSB that are present in Georgia peach orchards.
2. To understand how existing ground cover management practices in Southeastern peach production impact communities of predators and their predation of BMSB.