 As Beth was saying, I applied for this SAIA Graduate Student Grant to help support my master's research. And so a lot of the data I'm going to present is from that. And so I know the talk says I'm going to focus on pests and raspberry, but for those of you who work in raspberry or other berry crops, you know that spotted wing drosophila is the pest that we're really talking about. So my talk is really going to focus on spotted wing drosophila. And if you can't hear me, just give me some motion and I'll shout a little bit louder at you. So before I start talking about spotted wing drosophila management, I wanted to go back to integrated pest management and really understand what that idea is. And remember that, you know, that's our ultimate goal is to use the best tools we have available to manage pests and the pest complex on a farm, right? So we know that there's this combination of prevention, of cultural control, of physical control, biological is also important, and then we have chemical control. When we talk about spotted wing drosophila, we know that it's really disrupted our pest management system. So we are pretty much entirely reliant on chemical control. And that's, you know, that's not our fault. That's just what we have available to control this pest right now. But as you can imagine, this is not a great situation to be in, right? Because if chemical control for some reason fails, say you have resistance or it rained or, you know, something happens on your farm, then you're kind of SOL there. You know that we, we've got spotted wing drosophila that means you've got maggots in the fruit. So really what we need to do is focus on these other control methods that we can use to help support integrated pest management on our farms and control this pest. So again, I'm going to talk about these four branches of integrated pest management. I'm going to talk about physical first, then we'll go into cultural control and I have a lot to say there. And then we'll talk briefly about biological, biological control so you can understand what's happening with research there as well. So again, I'm going to focus on physical control and with that comes exclusion netting. And so we did a project in 2015 and 2016 looking at exclusion netting in both small structures and then also in large high tunnel structures. So what we want to know there is if we put exclusion netting on some sort of structure, will it keep SWD out of raspberries? So I'll start with that small scale study we did first. And so what we did here, there's a lot of info here, but basically we had plots that were untreated, plots that were covered in this netting structure, plots that were only treated with chemicals. So we had a five to seven day rotation of highly efficacious materials. And then we had a combination. So we had both netting and insecticide to see if that would help further reduce our infestation problems. So what we can see here, these are different sampling dates and then we have the average number of larvae that we have per gram. So this white bar is that untreated. And so you can see it's really high. If it's not treated, then you're gonna get infestation. And what you see subsequently is this insecticide control, this yellow bar, and then that netting control, that red. And so what you can see is if you either put netting on or insecticides, you get a reduction from that untreated control, which you would expect. But what we're also seeing is that that combination treatment is resulting in the lowest possible infestation. So we know that these two methods are working together to further reduce infestation. So this was data from 2014. When we jump in 2015, we sampled at a different time in the year here. So we sampled in July and that's when we don't have as many issues with spotting Drosophila. But I kept this up here because I wanna show you that, again, we see a high number of infestation in the untreated plots. And then the same trend as before, where you have combination treatment resulting in the lowest possible infestation. But what we also see here is this delay. So you start to get infestation in these control and these treated plots, not the combination. And then it's not until a couple of about ten days later that you start to see that infestation in that combination treatment. So this is really important, especially for raspberry growers to push spotting Drosophila infestation as far as you possibly can and just give you a better control of this pest and longer control. So what we learned from that is that netting reduces SWD infestation. Insecticides also reduce infestation. But that combination provides the greatest control. And we also saw that that combination delays spotted wing by up to ten days. So what we did from that data is decided to go big. We wanted to understand what it would be like in commercial production. So what we did is use exclusion netting on high tunnels. So we did this in an organic system where we just had a little magnetic strip closed door. And then we also did this in a conventional production system where we had these big barn doors that would allow for a tractor pulled sprayer to get in and out. And on the inside of the tunnel, it looks like this. So you can see there's this nice wall of netting here on the inside. And then this is looking at the outside. So we had these netted tunnels. And then right next to that, we had an open tunnel. And we were just comparing infestation season long. So what we found, again, that open tunnel or that kind of untreated tunnel was in that white bar. And so this is as the season goes on and the number of spotting Drosophila we're getting. We see that in the open tunnels, we get infestation much more. We have a lot more spotting Drosophila. In the netted, it's suppressed. We're still getting spotting Drosophila activity, especially later in the season. And it looks like if you apply insecticide sprays, then you're able to get control. So what we found is that netting is effective, but you need to be on your game. You need to be patching holes. You need to also be spraying and making sure that they're staying out of those situations. Again, I want to point out the delay. So the first catch in the open tunnel happened in late June. And then the first catch we had in the netted tunnel happened in late July. So again, this delay is really important. If you notice, this first catch is almost at the end of summer harvest. So there's a potential here to keep larvae out of your raspberries for the entire part of summer harvest if you have summer producing raspberries. So that's a really good advantage here with netting as well. We also found again that it reduces infestation across eggs, larvae, and adults. Again, we're still getting some SWD found in those netted tunnels, so it's not perfect. Overall, we found about a 75% reduction with netting. And I will say that other people are trying netting across the US and in Europe, and they are having really good luck. Some are not having to spray any insecticides at all. If they're able to keep everything patched, keep their door closed and sealed. The next thing I want to talk about moving on to cultural control is understanding our landscape that surrounds our crop. And if there's alternate hosts and what we can do about those and how those alternate hosts will affect spotting Drosophila populations. So again, in Michigan and Wisconsin is very similar. We have these farms with a lot of woodlots, and then we have in those woodlots a lot of different wild raspberry, wild blackberry, honeysuckle, a lot of different fruits. And spotting Drosophila will use those fruits. So what we did is a study in 2016 and in 2017 to understand surrounding blueberry, what wild hosts are there? What are they using and what's available to them? And then does the presence of those hosts increase the severity of spotting Drosophila and also the onset? And so what I mean by that is if you have number of SWD by time, without hosts you would expect this general population growth where you see first early catch in the spring and then it goes up in the summer. Potentially with hosts what you might see, this is hard to see here, but you might get an earlier catch and then result in a higher population. So that's what we are looking at. We wanted to see if that was true or not. So again, as I mentioned, if you walk around the edge of a farm, there's a lot of other hosts that you can pick up. So this was me walking around the edge of a blueberry farm and just looking at other fruits that I could collect. So this is clearly a problem. This is something that's probably not sprayed because it's again fill able to spray and it's also probably teaming with SWD. So we're getting the support of SWD populations and we're trying to understand what we can better do about that. So we know that Spada Wing Drosophila like a lot of wild hosts. And so here's a list going down of what we found. This is by no means a comprehensive list. They will utilize a lot of different things, but this is what we found surrounding Michigan blueberry crops. And so this is organized also by the seasonality of this. So in the late part of the season we get a lot of American pokeweed, a lot of olive, dogwood, crab, apple, some of those late fruiting varieties. In the early part of the season we get blackberry, raspberry and then honeysuckle. Now I wanna focus on that honeysuckle because honeysuckle fruits before blueberry fruits. So there's that potential that honeysuckle could help build up Spada Wing Drosophila populations and then they move into the blueberry. So again we were testing that and what we did is basically sample those. So again this is hard to see but here is a honeysuckle bush and if you look really closely you can see little red fruits. And then here's that blueberry crop. So again they can potentially hang out in this honeysuckle, build up populations and then go over to the blueberry crop. So what we did is sample those honeysuckle basically. What we did for 2016 and 2017 is collect the honeysuckle that was there, monitor adult populations and also monitor the larvae in the blueberry crop. So this is our basic setup. So we worked at six different blueberry farms in West Michigan. And what we had these white circles mean blueberry crop that was surrounded by a non-host, so something like an oak tree or a pine tree, something they can't reproduce on. And then we also had sample sites that were within the woods there. These green circles indicate blueberry crop that was next to honeysuckle. And then again those stars indicate where that honeysuckle is on that farm. And then we also had sample sites in the interior of the farm. So we're just trying to understand if there's this localized effect of that honeysuckle on the blueberry spotting drosophila populations. So here's another farm with the same setup. Again these green indicate where that honeysuckle is and those white indicate the non-host areas. So I'm gonna show you a quick video, hopefully you'll be able to see this okay. But this is a heat map as we go throughout the season starting in June. And you'll start to see some blue dots here that's indicating spotting drosophila presence. And you can start to see that red come in. And if you notice that red is really focused where those honeysuckle bushes are. So this is really giving us a good indication that honeysuckle is impacting populations. If you also notice while you watch that we found SWD all throughout the farm. But they are more severe in those areas. So again we're being told here that spotting drosophila behavior is affected by honeysuckle production. So now I'll show you the numbers and what we are finding. So if we look at SWD activity, adult activity, so what we found in the traps. If we just look at the woods here we found that overall this green line is where that honeysuckle is. We have a higher population in the honeysuckle compared to that non-host. And this is throughout the season here. If you look in the crop it's a little bit messier. So again we have throughout the season and the number we see. So that green line still remains on top so that crop next to the honeysuckle. And then that blue line is the interior and somewhere in the middle there is the crop non-host. So that means a blueberry that's adjacent to something that's not a host. So I'll show you those numbers if we just look at season long averages. 2016 is on the left and 2017 is on the right. We have very different pest pressure years throughout these different years. I don't know if you guys also had really big problems with SWD this year. But if you notice our average year was around 40 to 50 per trap. And then in 2017 it was around three to 400. So really, really bad years for us. But what we found again is that honeysuckle overall has the greatest number of spottowing drosophila adults and then the interior has the lowest. And this was especially apparent in 2017. But what we also found is that that crop honeysuckle had significantly more spottowing drosophila activity than that interior or the non-host. If we look at infestation that's again a little bit messier but that green line is the number of spottowing drosophila larvae we see per fruit. And so what we see is that initial infestation does occur greater near the crop honeysuckle, near the blueberry adjacent to the honeysuckle. As we get later into the season that trend kind of disappears. I think what's happening there is that once spottowing drosophila populations get so high here they start to spread out to the rest of the farm. Again, season long averages we're seeing that the blueberry adjacent to the honeysuckle has significantly more infestation compared to the interior of the crop. It was not significantly statistically different from the crop next to the non-host, but we're still seeing this trend and we're still seeing a higher number of larvae. So this is telling us that, yes, alternate hosts do affect SWD populations and this probably means we should be managing them in some way, right? It's hard to say what that management is and we're still gonna be working on this next year to understand if it's worth it to go out there and remove that honeysuckle or those alternate hosts. But I think the more important takeaway here is walk around the edge of your farm and understand what's out there because that'll help you detect those hot spots and understand where spottowing drosophila populations are gonna come in from. If you've got a big stand of raspberries or a big stand of honeysuckle, I would say it's probably worth it to remove that out, especially if you're already gone out there this winter and doing some pruning. Next, I want to talk about harvest frequency with raspberries. So again, staying on that cultural control theme. So understanding if increasing our harvest frequency can decrease infestation that we see in raspberries. So I'll go over this kind of quickly. But basically what we did in 2016 and 2015 was have raspberry plots that are either harvested every day, every other day, or every two days. And we just took all those samples and looked at spottowing drosophila larvae. And what we found here, the average number of eggs or larvae we see, and eggs first and second in stars and then third in stars. So if you harvest every day or every two days, you get a significant reduction compared to when you harvest every three days for each of these life stages. And I also want to direct your attention to this third in stars. So this is probably the smallest infestation you're thinking, that doesn't matter as much. But really that's the most important because those third in stars are the ones that are visible to the naked eye. So you pop open the fruit and you can see that little worm going inside. So you can potentially get complete eradication of that third in star larvae when you harvest every day or if you harvest every two days, you get significant reduction. So again, I think that harvest frequency, if you're able to provide the labor, this is probably the best thing we have aside from chemical control. So I'd really think about whether or not you can employ this on your farm. And I also want to talk about sanitation practices really quickly. A lot of our growers in Michigan were removing their waste fruit, but then they would, say, leave it in a bucket next to their farm. And we're kind of thinking that that's probably not the best thing to do, right, because Spadawing Drosophila will come out and then they'll go back into the crop and just reinvest. So we want to suppress those adult populations as much as we possibly can. So what we did is a bagging study just to understand how long it takes for those larvae to die once they're bagged. So we bagged this waste fruit, something like this. And we found that if you leave that bag in the sun for 32 hours, 99% of the larvae are killed. Really, I think it's incredible that 1% of the larvae will still survive after being bagged for 32 hours in the hot sun. But we also found that clear bags will get hotter than black or white bags. So I would recommend using clear bags so that you have that greenhouse effect and kill them a little bit faster there. I also want to talk a little bit about pruning practices and understanding how that can reduce infestation. So I'll talk about this in blueberry and in raspberry. And so what I mean by that is just basically opening up that canopy, making it so you're changing that microclimate and you're making it less hospitable for Spadawing Drosophila to lay eggs and to like hanging out in that area. You're also going to increase spray penetration by doing that. So what we did again, raspberries on the top and blueberries on the bottom. So what we did here is have what we called a grower standard, where it was we thought what the standard practices were for pruning. And then we had treatments where we pruned more than that. So we removed even more in case of raspberries, we removed all fluorocanes. And then we had 25% less pruning, where we left a lot more material in the canopy. And we just looked again at infestation season long. When we talk about raspberries, we might see a numerical difference when you prune more compared to less pruning, but we didn't see any statistical difference. I think part of that is because we were on a v-trellis. So that means the fruiting wall is already on the outside. So most of the infestation and what's going on in the canopy is already on the outside. So it's not really important what's going on the inside. In blueberries, however, we did see a strong effect here. Is if you have some amount of regular pruning, we get significantly less larvae than if you just leave the bush. So I think this is more, take this as a reminder to keep your pruning practices, making sure that you're clearing out any basically opportunity for spotting drosophila to have that nice heat and humidity that it likes. The next thing I wanna mention with cultural control is talking about ground floor management. So again, this was a trial done in blueberry. And this is the same concept where we're trying to manipulate microclimate and understand how microclimate is gonna change with these different treatments. So we had blueberries that were covered in wood chips, blueberries that were covered in weed fabric. We had a bare ground treatment and then buckwheat treatment. It turns out that entomologists are not very good at growing cover crops. Yeah. So this is more of a bare ground treatment as we go along here. So again, we're trying to understand if ground floor management can reduce larval infestation. When we look at the interior part of the canopy, we don't see a significant difference across these treatments, but we do see this numerical difference with weed fabric. This is kind of what we expected. Weed fabric is gonna get really hot. It's also gonna allow potentially kill those pupae that are dropping out of the fruit. It's gonna kill them because that weed fabric is so hot. On the exterior of the canopy is where we saw that statistically significant difference. So we know that we can at least say for sure, weed fabric is having some effect. We also found overall lower infestation of spotting drosophila on the exterior part of the canopy. Again, that's just telling you about their behavior. They prefer to be on the inside of part of that canopy where they're nice and protected compared to the outside. But weed fabric did have that strong effect of reducing infestation. So again, this was done on a small farm, small trial. So we're gonna go big this year and try to convince some growers to put this out on their new plantings and see if we can have an effect there. So basically I have this list of things we can do for cultural control. So that includes exclusion netting, scouting your landscape for alternative hosts, increasing your harvest frequency, remembering the sanitation practices, and then utilizing weed fabric and maintaining your regular production. So this is a long list of things. And not all of these might work for your farm, but some of them might. So the idea here is that we're starting to build up a different control method. So if you kind of look at this list and think about what you can take home and potentially use on your farm. I wanna talk briefly again about biological control. So I'll go over what native natural enemies might be controlling spottoming drosophila populations right now. And then also just give you a brief update on classical biological control. So going over to South Korea and China where spottoming drosophila is native to and then trying to introduce new natural enemies there. So in that ground floor management trial, we also did a ground predation study to understand if predation was different in these different habitats. So we again have that buckwheat treatment, the wood chips, the bare ground and the weed fabric. If you squint on that weed fabric, you might be able to see these little orange dots there. Those are SDVD pupae. So what we did is put pupae out for two days and then take them back in and basically see how many were damaged and also trap the ground predators that were there in a trap and understand who's there, who might be controlling spottoming drosophila pupae from that. So this is a picture of an intact pupae. And when we left him out in the field for a couple of days, this is what we found. We found pupae that obviously had these little munching marks. So we know that there is some sort of predation going on out there. We're still not sure who entirely is responsible for that. I decided to share this kind of fun photo. Again, it might be hard to make out, but here we have an ant carrying away a fruit fly and it's mandibles back to its colony. This happens pretty often in the fall, especially when spottowing drosophila populations are so high. So again, we are seeing that there is predation going on, but not very much of it. And it's sort of the same story when we talk about parasitism. So for the past two years, we've been conducting a survey of understanding what parasitoids are out there that might be controlling spottowing drosophila. So we're finding that when we're trapping, almost half of our collections are fruit fly parasitoids. So that's good. We're at least on the right track there. But when we look at parasitism rates in the field, they're less than 2%. And that's consistent across different states as well. So it's consistent in New York and North Carolina and California where other researchers have conducted these studies. So really, this just points to the fact that we need help. We need biological control. We need something to be able to release. So that brings me to classical biological control. So again, releasing natural enemies into Michigan or into Wisconsin to control spottowing drosophila populations. So there's a group, a researching group out of UC Berkeley who's gone over to South Korea and China, basically spent a bunch of days in the field trying to look for parasitoids and then bring them back to the US in a quarantine facility. And so what we can do there is evaluate those parasitoids and understand, what other fruit flies did they attack? Are they really good at attacking spottowing drosophila in order to get that permit to release them? So about nine months ago, we submitted a permit to release two larval parasitoids that are pictured here. So they attacked first and second instars of spottowing drosophila larvae, and they're pretty good at it. That permit was denied, and that was about three months ago that it was denied. But this group is really hopeful to address those concerns and get that permit resubmitted. So it's not going to be this year that we're going to get parasitoids, but it might be the following year. So I just wanted to give you an update that we are working on classical biological control and trying to get something released that might help us out there. And then I wanted to put in a plug, too, if you're interested in biological control and want to learn more about it in the framework of spottowing drosophila management. There's a free webinar, Good Bugs vs. Bad, happening on February 23rd. So there's a link here you can register. But if you're interested in it, see me afterwards, and I can hook you up with that. And then lastly, I want to talk about chemical control, because obviously that's what we do for spottowing drosophila management for the most part. So I wanted to give you an idea of what growers in Michigan are using to control spottowing drosophila in raspberries. So here we have the different classes of insecticides. So the neonics are in red. Pyrethroids are in that blue color. Organophosphate malifion is in that yellow. Spinosin and biologicals are in that green and gray. So in conventional and UPIC operations, we're seeing pretty consistent selection of materials. In UPIC, there is a little bit more malifion, because it has that short residual, and there's more biologicals being used again, because they have that short residual time. But overall, we're seeing good rotation with conventional and UPIC control and pretty good options. When we go down to organic control, we already know that it's really hard to control spottowing drosophila in organic management. But again, most growers are using in trust. I was surprised to see in the past two years, we're still having a lot of reliance on pyganic. We're finding that delegate is that better rotator. Grandivo is a better rotation partner with in trust. So if you are an organic grower, I recommend using Grandivo over Pyganic, because Pyganic does flare those mics and cause other issues. So I wanna walk you through a couple of spray programs just to show you what worked for us and what didn't work actually for these growers. So I'm gonna set these up all in the same way. So here we have the infestation. The average number of larvae we see per fruit, capped at five, which five is a lot of larvae and fruit. And then we have the season as it goes. This white bar is the number of larvae we see. And then these little rain clouds indicate rain that was over half an inch. So I just wanna show you, this is an example of a spray program that was first started too late. So you can see they didn't start until August and they did an application of brigade. Infestation was already really high, but that application did bring it down. 10 days later, they followed it with malifion. Again, that interval's pretty long, but they're starting to, again, they go back in five days later with brigade. Two days later with the application of malifion following that rain, bringing spotting drosophila populations down. Six days later with delegate and then 19 days they finish off the season with another application of brigade. So what we're finding here again is that they started too late and their intervals were irregular and just too long. But the nice thing I like to take home from this graph is we had infestation levels up to four and five larvae per raspberry. That's really high infestation, but what we are learning is that if you shorten your intervals and apply appropriate materials, you can bring that down. So I think that's something that you can take away from that. Looking at another spray program, we start the application early with malifion. Six days later with grandevo. Three days, grandevo. Six days, malifion. Three days, grandevo. Four days, delegate. Three days, grandevo and a tank mix with the sale. And that's when that spray program ended. I think what happened here is this grower sprayed himself out. This is a lot of applications, but they worked. They were able to keep spotting drosophila larvae low. We didn't see that infestation grow until we got that rain period. So that last application actually lasted a pretty long time. But this again was a good spray program and you're using materials that wash away quickly. So this was, this particular farm was a UPIC, so they're interested in materials that are only gonna last a few days. And then the last program I wanna show you is kinda what I see as the Cadillac method if you're not using any other of these cultural control methods that I presented earlier. So as we go through this, you can kinda see that they're rotating their materials really well. They're using tight intervals and they're loosening their intervals when they can. So when they have a gap in the weather, they can loosen. But when it starts to rain again, they start to tighten their intervals. And we get really successful season long control here. This is an intense spray program, but again, it's a really good example of using good materials season long and rotating those materials to avoid resistance. So again, I've kind of talked about these four branches of integrated pest management and what works with us in Michigan and what we're seeing. Cultural control is more and more important, I think. And I've kind of created this list for you of things that you can do on your farm. Again, this is a long list and hopefully some of it will work for you. Hopefully you can take home some of this on your farm. So I think I'm optimistic about spotting risophila control when we talk about spotting risophila long term. I think we're starting to bring the balance back. By no means have we fixed this problem or created IPM on farms yet. But I think we're continuing to try and we're getting better and better at it. So I wanna thank the folks that worked on this, especially our summer hires and the field technicians that we have, grower collaborators. I wouldn't be able to do it without the grower collaborators. So for those of you who work with researchers, it's super helpful and it allows us to get this great data so that we can then present it to you. And I of course wanna thank the SARE program for inviting me here to give this talk, but also for the opportunities allowed in the grant funding.