 My name is George Heimpel, and I'm going to be talking about the same system that Anthony just did, so it's great to follow that because I don't need to explain a lot of this. But I'll be working more on the natural enemies, the bio-control side of things. And I'm just sort of starting the second year of this SAIR grant. So I'll be giving a more sort of general presentation about the kind of work that the SAIR grant kind of fits into, but the SAIR from the first year will be there. So just as Anthony said, this is just a brief intro to soybean aphid. The soybean aphid is native to Asia, and it was first discovered in Wisconsin in the year 2000. And so this shows sort of the part of the country that it was in during just that first year. And it's now, as you know, spread through much of the soybean growing areas. And as Anthony mentioned, it's now sort of the primary, the key pest in soybean. An interesting thing is that, so this is showing the millions of acres here in these black bars or pounds sprayed within the north-central states. So this is basically a phrase for soybean aphid. Prior to the arrival of soybean aphid to very little spraying, once it came, you can see that this really skyrocketed. These are nasty statistics, and this is just for the years that they're there. And so we were up to almost 10 million acres sprayed. So it's clearly an important pest, oops, there's supposed to be, yeah, there we go. But it would be even a much worse pest were it not for natural enemies that are currently controlling it in the field now. So you saw that we got up to at the peak in 2006, up to spraying about 10 million acres well, that's out of 70 million. So it's not like every field is getting sprayed. And part of the reason that not every field is getting sprayed is that there are native predators of the soybean aphid that are feeding on it. And so this just shows some of these, Anthony showed a picture of a lady beetle and there are lady beetles and there are predatory flies and life swings and predatory bugs. So there are a lot of predators out there, excuse me, that are feeding on soybean aphid making it less of a critical pest than it would otherwise be. You can show this with simple cage studies where you cage some plants just as Anthony showed and you leave some field sections uncaged. And if you do for a short amount of time even, you can see that the number of aphids within the cages is much higher than in the open field. This is basically due to the action of natural enemies. This is a short enough time frame so that the cages aren't holding in the winged aphids which can happen if you do this for a long time. So biological control is real, it's happening in our fields but it's not happening to an extent to make the soybean aphid a non-pest. It's still a pest and that's because this doesn't happen in every field. So much of the focus of my work has been to ask how can we improve this? How can we improve biological control of soybean aphid so that it's a non-pest so that we don't have to spray for it? And the host plant resistance that Anthony talked about is a great way but biological control is another way and those two strategies do tend to work together well. But I'm not talking about that so I'll just focus on this stuff. So the main things that I've been working in my lab or the main strategies have been one to try to see what happens if we increase the diversity of the cropping system. And so I'll talk a little bit about that and then the other thing is that as I mentioned the soybean aphid is native to Asia and soybean aphid is a much different insect in Asia than it is here. And I've been to China a bunch of times and you know the main thing I come away with on those trips is that it's really hard to find soybean aphid. It's a rare insect there and when you find it you find soybean aphids and they're riddled with these little what we call mummies which are parasitized aphids. And what's happened to these things is that they used to be regular aphids going through their day but a parasitic wasp came up to them, stung them, laid an egg inside them and the larva then sort of fed on it from the inside. And so a lot of my work has been go to China find these parasitic wasps, see whether we can bring them here to release them. The process of doing all that means that we have to be sure that they'll be safe. So there's an incredibly long and rigorous process of safety testing that we have to go through and we've brought back about 20 species of wasps from Asia to put through this and out of those 20 we now have a permit for three. So three of those species turned out to be safe to release and so we're now working on those. And this is what one of those looks like. And so I'm going to talk about some of the work that we've been doing in these two areas. Some of that is a serowork but once we get into the main part of our serowork it's really going to be to look at an interaction. How does landscape level diversity interact with these wasps and can that give us or the best biological control? So I'll talk first about some work that we did with diversity and this actually goes back to pre-ser days and this is work that we did in organic beans and it's a fall seeded rye cover crop. And basically how this works is when you're on a corn to soybean rotation or wheat to soybean you harvest the corn or the wheat in the fall and then you plant rye into that stubble. And then you basically let the rye over winter and then you drill beans into that rye and then in the summer you mow the rye at just sort of the right time and then you harvest the beans. And I'll just kind of show you. So this is what the rye looks like in its overwintering stage. So it's sort of a shaggy lawn obviously this kind of cover crop has a lot of benefits beyond what we were looking at which is looking at the effects on soybean aphid because you're covering the soil. And this is what it looks like in the spring so it really gets up pretty high and then you actually drill into those beans, I mean into that rye, so you drill the beans into that rye and it starts to come up and that's when you mow the rye. And then you get this sort of mulchy looking field. This is one shot that we have, this is another shot that we have where we compared the rye covered beans with just you know the monoculture beans. And so I'll show you data that we got. This is a combination of on-farm studies and experiment station studies and it worked really well. So in all of these studies we had much higher, well in some cases much higher but in a lot of cases higher, but here much higher densities of aphids in the monocrop so without rye. So with the rye here we have much lower numbers. This here, I have this line supposed to be at 250, I don't know why it's there, supposed to be at 250 like ant, ant and you said that's a spray threshold. So you can see that it worked here to control soybean aphid which is great, you know the danger of course is that the rye competes with the beans to such an extent that you get a yield drag and we found that this site that this didn't happen that the yields were you know about the same. This is one site, here's another site, this is a field experiment station, not so quite pronounced, but the yield was similar. This is our favorite site, this is Lee Thomas' farm, I don't know if you guys know Lee, but he actually uses this rye sort of on a permanent basis as far as I know. And the aphids in the monoculture beans got up to about 6,000 per plant. With the rye is much lower. So the aphids here got to such high levels that there's actually a yield drag for not having the rye. So the rye actually gave a yield bump, we were worried about a yield drag but here we got a yield bump. So this is really encouraging, oh sorry, this is our last site where there were fewer aphids with the rye, but this is a case where there was a yield drag, so I don't want you to think that this thing always works perfectly and that you always get a higher yield. This is a case where there was a yield drag, so there was a higher yield in the monoculture. This was a site in the year where it was very dry and so what we think is that when it's dry, the effects of competition are stronger. So let's just think about these aphids which are lower in the presence of the rye cover crop and my whole introduction about natural enemies and bio control and how great that all is. What we thought might happen is that if we have the rye, that might give a better habitat for natural enemies so you might get better biological control. Predators eating aphids in the presence of the rye, but that wasn't the case. So at least for all the measurements that we did, we didn't find any evidence for better bio control. There are still fewer aphids but not better bio control. So what it probably is is that if you have your beans growing in this kind of a setting, the aphids simply can't find it as well and it also might be that the quality of the soybeans, the beans are lower for the aphids. So because there is some competition going on. But we think it's more sort of a plant-mediated effect than really bio control being better. So I'd like to talk about the Asian parasitoid wasps now and I'm just going to talk about two and they're both in the genus aphalinus which is a really tiny little wasp. It's called a wasp but it's nothing like a yellow jacket. So it's literally about the size of the period on a page or it's smaller than that. Like if it was walking along a page and it could walk onto a period of size 12 font and you wouldn't see it, it's that small. It's almost microscopic. So there's two species. The one is called aphalinus certus. This is not one of those that we got a permit for. This is one that came on its own. So just as soybean aphid was introduced, this one was introduced and we don't know how, we don't really know from where except that we know it's native to Asia. But it's now found here and I'll talk about that one. The other one is aphalinus iglycinus which is one that we got a permit for. So this is a safe one. This is one that really attacks only the soybean aphid. Whereas this one attacks pretty much any aphid that it comes into contact with. Oh, so yeah, this is the aphid pericid lifecycle which I already mentioned. So the wasp lays its egg inside the aphid. That egg hatches into a larva which feeds on the aphid from the inside. And then there's a pupa and it pops out once it's ready. And then the whole cycle starts again. This whole cycle takes like 12 days or so. So it's pretty quick. And each wasp can lay, you know, 200 eggs. So for aphalinus certus, the first thing I'd like to say is that we've been We first found it in Rosemount, Minnesota and St. Paul, Minnesota in 2011. And since then, this is data from this last year, so from the summer of 2014, we're partnering with the Minnesota Department of Ag to sample for it. And all these dots are sampling points. And the blue are the counties in which we found aphalinus certus. So it's pretty much throughout the state. But for the whole time that we've been sampling it, we still have never found it in the southeastern corner of the state. So we'll see. So if there's anyone here from there, I hope you don't feel too badly. But so we'll follow that. The second thing I like to show is just how it's been growing. So as I mentioned, we found it just serendipitously in August of 2011. And then in the next year, we sampled for it. And you can see in 2012, there really wasn't a lot. This is the number of wasps per plant. Sorry, this is kind of a small font. But it grew. So the highest number here is 40. So we're up to this last year, a maximum average of about 30 per plant. The maximum actual number of mummies per plant was more like a couple of 100. So if you multiply that by the number of plants, you can see that this thing has now established well. And it's a pretty major player now. It's one of the most unimportant natural enemies of soybean athid. So now I'd like to talk about Aphthalinus gliscinus. And it looks almost the same. And we got a permit for this in October of 2012. And we started to release it starting last summer and then this summer too. So 2013, where we did releases in St. Paul. And 2014, we did them at, where do we do? Again in St. Paul and also in Cottonwood and Northfield. And so this is one of our release sites. Basically what we do is that we rear them by the hundreds of thousands, which isn't that hard to do. They're very easy to rear in the lab. And we put them in these little tubs out in the middle of fields. And then we kind of monitor how far they spread. So there were these two sites that we used this last summer. And at each one, we released 75,000 wasps. And this is, by the way, the Sierra Grant. This is year one of what the Sierra Grant was about. And so this was the week of July 26 at both sites. And then you can see that at the Northfield site, we got up to, again, 30 to 40 mummies per plant in that area right around here, whereas Cottonwood less. So they were well able to establish during the field season at those sites. What we don't yet know is whether they're able to overwinter. We're pretty sure that the ones from the 2013 releases, which were done basically to study ways to release it. And we use those data to develop this method here. But we're pretty sure from all the sampling that we've done that they did not overwinter from that release. And 2013 was a very harsh winter. So we're hopeful that maybe they'll be able to overwinter now. Although this winter has had some harsh times, too. So we're now doing an overwintering study. And this is a buckthorn shrub. And some of you might not be aware, but the soybean aphid overwinter is on buckthorn. So it has this obligate movement from buckthorn in the winter to soybean in the summer and back and forth. And so this was a study. It's kind of hard to see because it's all white here. But these are buckthorn twigs that we've put mesh bags around and tied. And we had previously put wasps into those twigs that had aphids on them. So it's a way to see, will these wasps be able to overwinter here under field conditions? And so this is just from this season. So we'll know in the spring how they did. And that's sort of what I've got for you today. Just to conclude, one of my messages is that soybean aphid is a pest. But it could be a much worse pest if it weren't for the natural biological control that's happening. But we want that control to be better. And so some of the things that we're trying to do is that we're trying to increase the landscape diversity. This is a picture of some plots that we have at Rosemount where we're using prairie plots and seeing whether sort of a simulated prairie can aid biological control, which is part of this air grant that's sort of coming up. And we're also working on these parasitic wasps. And our next step really is to try to combine these. Can we use this habitat management and the wasps in a way that are synergistic, just as Anthony was saying? So I think over the next couple of years we'll be able to figure that out. And I would just like to acknowledge there's people that have worked with us on this, including farmers, Lee Thomas and Paul Aghini. And Sarah obviously helped to fund this, but there are other funding sources as well. And if there are any questions, I hope we have some time for those. Yeah. So the question was whether the height of the rye stems could have an impact. And I think it probably could. But it's not something that we really have measured or have looked at. So the question was, can we buy these wasps? Are they commercially available? And the answer is no. And it just wouldn't be economically feasible to do that. So this is a kind of project that's done at universities and at the USDA. And if it works, they'll just spread throughout the region all by themselves or with a little bit of help. And in a few years we'll all be saying, remember soybean aphid? Oh, yeah. So the question, I think, was whether or not we think that the wasps also overwinter on the buckthorn. Yes. So the answer to that is that we don't really know. But for this species, Aphthalanus gliscinus, which is a specialist, there really aren't any other aphids in Minnesota or in North America except for the cotton aphid, which is really closely related to soybean aphid. So there really aren't any other aphids that it's likely to be able to overwinter on. Pretty much has to overwinter with soybean aphid. And soybean aphid obligately overwinter on buckthorn. So I think Aphthalanus gliscinus, if it's going to be an effective biological control agent, has to find a way to get to buckthorn. And it has to be able to overwinter there. Question was, how can soybean aphid be a pest in areas that don't have the overwintering host? And the answer is that they're highly mobile little insects. They're blown. And we know that they can be blown hundreds of miles. It's probably more like thousands of miles. Yeah, yeah. So the question is with these highly mobile pests, whether the natural enemies go with them. And actually, let me go back, because there's a picture I love here. So I'm showing these mummies, right? Here's two regular looking aphids that turned into mummies. But this one, you can see that it has wings. So what does that mean? That means that a wasp stung that aphid, either when it had wings, or when it was about to have wings. Because when a wasp stings an aphid, that aphid doesn't die immediately. It has the egg inside of it. The egg hatches after a couple of days. And meanwhile, that aphid is living. It's feeding. In some cases, it's even reproducing. And it can fly. So what that means is that the wasps can basically hitchhike on their hosts. They can be carried within the aphids as eggs. And that's what I think is sort of the primary mechanism by which they could follow the aphids to the overwintering host and be closely linked in to the population dynamics of the aphids. So the question was whether there's as much known about the distribution of aphelina certis in other states. And the answer is not really. So aphelina certis was actually first found in Pennsylvania. And then it was found. And it's very well known in the soybean growing regions of Canada. And there, if you talk to people working in Quebec, they say aphelina certis is absolutely controlling soybean aphid. So it seems to me like it either came in on its own somehow or there was a second introduction of soybean aphid with those things more on the east coast. Because it sort of was on the east coast and it got here in 2011. But it was known from the east. But other states in between and to the west, we don't really know. I would say that soybean aphids only been here for about 15 years. So it makes sense that the natural enemy community would adapt to it. And it also makes sense that it would grow because this is an amazing new food source. And the parasitic wasps that are native to here haven't really moved on to it very much. So to me, that's sort of a mystery. I don't know why. Because there are some wasps that can feed on it. And I don't know why they're not in the fields. But these predatory insects like the lady beetles and the predatory flies and the predatory bugs have sort of upped their game over the last 10 to 15 years. So Anthony was mentioning the threshold of 250, which the research for that was done in 2004, 2005, maybe to 2006. OK, that's fine. But this is just sort of my personal opinion. I think it's too low now. And I see a lot of fields where the aphids go to 250, which is where a farmer is supposed to treat. Then they go to 400, then they go back down. And Anthony rightly said that the economic injury level, actually for $6 beans, is 675 aphids per plant. So that's why Anthony's looking at these softer insecticides. And his group with Bob Cook, that's one of the main things that they do. So definitely, you know, the Lamdisi halothrin and the Espen valerate highly toxic to all these natural enemies. But there are people looking at these softer insecticides. I'm not so up on the literature. I think a lot of times you do find what Anthony found was like, oh, this looks really promising. But you put it in the trials and it doesn't work all that well. But that's not to say that there might not be some out there that are effective.