After two seasons of working with Avaunt eVo, we have a better understanding of its efficacy and utility against Lygus bug in strawberries. Avaunt eVo's active ingredient is indoxacarb, which was first registered in 2004 as an ant bait, but now finally was registered for use in strawberries in 2025. Avaunt eVo works by being … Continue reading Testing Avaunt eVo part 1: Carrier volume and adjuvants

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”― Sun Tzu, The Art of … Continue reading The Lewis Mite Saga Continues

I am so happy to start working on Lygus hesperus this year. The mites took a bite out of me and my lab. It was a mite-y task, but we finished it with all our might and strength. They might have beaten us down, but we were not out. With Lygus starting to pick up … Continue reading Lygus Season 2025

My master's student Colin Koubek has finished the first phase of a series of experiments examining a selection of fungicides used in 2023 and their interactions with selected adjuvants on the survival of Phytoseiulus persimilis. This effort is part of a larger research project to examine P. persimilis quality from the bottle to the field. … Continue reading Mites vs Predators vs Adjuvants vs Assumptions

If you search "Lewis mite" or "Eotetranychus lewisi" in google scholar you will find less than 450 scientific papers, but if you type in "two-spotted spider mite" or "Tetranychus urticae" you will find over 119,000 papers. Lewis mites appear to be an under researched pest. This year I received my first exposure to this species … Continue reading A leopard doesn’t change its spots, but these mites will!

The work is quite feasible, and it is the only thing in our power . . . Let go the past. We must only begin. Believe me and you will see." -Epictetus, Discourse, 2.19.29-34 Insects and mites unfortunately do not celebrate the holidays, nor do they take vacations. And as a consequence, neither do we! … Continue reading Entomology Roadmap 2025

If you haven't heard the news, the monarch butterfly is under consideration for protection as a threatened species under the Section 4(d) of the Endangered Species Act. This journey began with a lawsuit from various environmental groups in 2014 and we are now reaching the finish line with this issue. FWS-R3-ES-2024-0137 is the docket number … Continue reading Monarchs on the March and What it Means

Disclaimer: This is not an endorsement of Avaunt. The content of this post is meant to be educational. The informed opinion presented here is based off of two trials we completed in Santa Maria using a backpack sprayer and a standard tractor spray. Additional information is from the scientific literature. In early September, Mark Bolda … Continue reading Avaunt Lygus!

There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will.  - Epictetus Artificial Intelligence has gripped the attention of many people in the last two years. If you have held stock in NVIDIA, Google, or Microsoft since 2019 I wholeheartedly envy your … Continue reading Strawberry Skynet: Artificial general intelligence and integrated pest management in strawberry production

It's been nine months since I first began my post as the entomologist at the Strawberry Center, but it seems like two weeks. It has been a blur of activity to develop and run experiments, hire the right people, chug from the firehose, and be able to respond to issues. I was worried I would … Continue reading Three lessons from my first Field Day

Drosophila suzukii, or spotted wing drosophila (SWD) is mother nature's loving way of reminding us how much she sometimes hates us. SWD can grow on anything. Some growers were hit hard in June of this year in Santa Maria and Oxnard with Drosophila. Processers were rejecting truckloads and growers were upset. Andrew Molinar of the … Continue reading Lost in the Suzukii Sauce

Figure 1: A DALL-E generated image from the author's input of a strawberry man wrestling a snake in the form of a Roman fresco inspired by the tales of Hercules strangling snakes that were sent by the goddess Hera. The Greco-Romans are the progenitors of much of our culture. Besides aqueducts, lead plumbing, asbestos curtains, … Continue reading Beware the temptation of Fraus

Figure 1. DALL-E generated image from the author's text input of a Lygus bug pondering his existence while thinking about a strawberry. The Lygus Question is one that has dogged me in my whole career as an entomologist. When I first started working on bush beans, there was Lygus. When I moved to the south, … Continue reading The Lygus Question

Lygus bugs imagined as nomadic raiders upon a Mesopotamian settlement in the late Bronze Age. Generated using DALL-E "More is lost by indecision than wrong decision.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero Rainfall influences the timing of the Lygus migration. Dr. Peter Goodell, the retired extension super-agent in the Central Valley, wrote that the rainfall extended into … Continue reading Beware the storm that delays the Lygus swarm?

Two months have flown by faster than I realized. Leaving the South and coming back to the West Coast after almost a decade is a bit jarring. Gone are the slow dusty beats of the corn, cotton, and soy tractors traversing the field filled with Ford F-250s and secondhand RAM 2500s. Now I stand on … Continue reading The Bug Man Cometh

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could get bees to deliver an effective agent to strawberry flowers that would protect them from infection by Botrytis cinerea? Researchers in Sweden (Iqbal et al. 2022; https://doi.org/10.1094/PHYTO-05-21-0205-R) used bumblebees to pick up a biocontrol fungus (Aureobasidium pullulans) and deliver it to strawberry flowers, reducing Botrytis fruit rot by … Continue reading Botrytis and Bees

We can test the quality of strawberry growers’ predatory mites (BOTH bottles or bean leaves). The freshest predatory mites guarantees the best results! We don’t want the mites to wait in the weather, so contact us the day before the mites arrive to schedule a drop-off or pickup! Please fill out and submit the form … Continue reading Want to learn about the quality of predatory mites you are receiving for your strawberry fields?

Twospotted spider mites prefer lower humidity, yet they are reproducing and even thriving in some strawberry fields with flooded furrows, even right now after the historical rain storms. Although the flooding causes higher humidity in the field overall, the microclimate around the plant is still hospitable to spider mites (Fig. 1). As long as the … Continue reading Spider mites in saturated strawberry fields

Insect pest management in strawberries: A closer look at the IPM toolbox, Sarah Zukoff

This summer we’ve experienced high levels of lygus infestation, especially in the Santa Maria and Oxnard growing districts. It’s a good time to review some basic lygus biology. Figure 1. Lygus bug species most often found in California strawberries. 1. There are 19 species of Lygus in California; however, only two species can be regularly … Continue reading A bumper crop of lygus: 7 facts about lygus bugs you may not have known

The salt marsh caterpillar is a common species which feeds on many different species of plants and can be found sporadically on strawberries throughout the year. The defoliation can be quite dramatic in spots when several egg masses hatch at once and the larvae start to feed gregariously. Spot treatments of insecticides (Bacillus thuringiensis, spinosad, … Continue reading Salt marsh caterpillar damage in strawberries

Spotted wing drosophila, Drosophila suzukii (SWD), will have a new natural enemy to contend with in the Salinas and Santa Maria growing regions. After ten years of research by a determined group of entomologists to find a better parasitoid for SWD, Ganaspis brasiliensis (Gb for short) is a parasitoid that attacks the SWD larvae and … Continue reading SWD parasitoid releases!

Strawberry growers requested quality checks on the predatory mite products they were buying since they felt the numbers promised on the label did not always match the number of live mites they actually received. Here I summarize the samples we have received so far from January 2021 to May 2022. We received a total of … Continue reading Predatory mite bottle counts for 2021-2022 update: Spider mite biocontrol in California strawberries: Part 2