 Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Caitlin Casheimer. I am an extension entomologist. And today, I'm going to give just some quick insect pests that should be on our minds as grass is greening up and springtime is here. And as we're recording this, it is raining buckets after we got a couple inches last night. And so that's certainly weather and climate will factor into what type of insects we see in our turf systems. And so if we can have a heads up and be more proactive, then that gives us a much better chance of dealing with these pests as they are going to come up throughout the growing season or the summer. And so when we're talking about insect pests of turf, we usually group them into which part of the plant they are feeding on. And so we have insects with piercing, stalking mouth parts that are going to suck up the plant juices, chinch bugs, spittle bugs, and mites. And then we have insects that have chewing mouth parts and really strong jaws that they can chew on the leaves and the stem of our grasses, a variety of armyworms, but most notably the fall armyworm, billbugs, cutworms, and sod webworms. And then we have insects that feed on the soil and roots. And some of these are interchangeable in terms of where they're feeding. Billbugs can feed in the soil and roots level, ants, particularly fire ants, white grubs, mole crickets, and wireworms. And so for today, I'm just going to pick one of these from each category. Just talk about what to think about planning for this year and how to control them if they are at infestation levels. And so the first one are chinch bugs. They are currently hunkered down for the winter, but really starting to wake up these last couple of weeks. We have several generations in Alabama. And we can have more if we go into the southern part of the state and into Florida. And in this pest, both the nymphs and the adults can feed and suck those plant juices. And they really prefer south-facing lawns that gets lots of sun. And in terms of varieties, we have a couple that are most susceptible. And usually this is where we see, especially in zoys the grass, we see really high populations of chinch bugs. The other above-ground plant juice sucking pest is the two-line spittle bug. They get the name from these two lines that they have as adults. And the nymphs, the immature forms, live in this frothy mass that they exude as they're feeding to protect them. And then the adults are free-living and hop around. And usually we don't see spittle bugs until we're mowing the lawn. And then they're bopping around, moving up on the lawn mower. And then we realize we have a large infestation. The damage looks like this kind of scorched appearance, like it isn't getting enough water or it's drought. But when you know you have a lot of water. And in this particular instance, spittle bugs, we really see high populations following a wet spring. Currently, I said it's been raining a couple inches this morning. And so if we continue to have wet weather, then that's really great for these spittle bugs to thrive. And then as they're feeding, they'll give off a saliva, a toxin, their saliva that turns the plant a little purple reddish color. And if we continue to see this spring weather, high temperatures, lots of rain, then that could be a problem in some of our grasses, especially in the southern part of the state. And then moving on to our above ground feeding army worms. If you've been around in the south and you've certainly seen something like this before, where we have caterpillars that are making their way across the lawn, moving en masse or in an army, unlike their name would suggest, and moving into this other green lawn and can do it very, very quickly. Now, if you want to avoid problems like this, the best thing we can do is be on the lookout for young caterpillars, but even better than that, fall army worm eggs. And the adult moths will lay egg masses of 1 to 200 eggs shown here and then cover them with hairs to give them a fuzzy appearance, but also to protect the eggs. And adult female moths prefer to lay them on flat surfaces. We see a lot of eggs laid on toys or play sets in the backyard, awnings or fans and outdoor structures. You can see them on the siding of your house. And in addition to laying it on that flat surface, there's usually some sort of green grass around. We've even seen egg masses laid on mailboxes, and then the caterpillars will hatch, and then they'll move out and start feeding. But if you can see these eggs first, they're easily removable with some power washing or hand removed, and then much easier to deal with when you take care of the eggs instead of the caterpillars. We've seen a couple of years ago, we had just giant populations of army worms that take out lawns across the board. It's not usually a major army worm infestation, like we've seen in the past couple of years, but they are a very consistent pest and they love well-irrigated, well-fertilized grass, particularly Bermuda grass, but in cases where there are large numbers, we do see them moving on to other grass types. In terms of control, really the goal and how long you need control for, how clean do you need your grass, how nice looking do you need it, and are you preparing for an entire season? And that's really gonna play into what you spray. We can get really cheap knockdown with pyrethroids, but we're seeing less and less control with these. They're also much less rain fast than some of our other products. The newer chemistries are more expensive, but we get more control and much longer residual. And so this is an option for a lot of our athletic fields. They can treat one or two times and it will also cover other pests as well, but much smaller operations. It's easier to go out with something like a pyrethroid. In many cases, these are restricted use pesticides and so they do require a pesticide applicator of license. And then the last two minutes here, I'm just gonna briefly cover fire ants. It has been a warm winter, so we've seen lots of mound formation and fire activity in our lawns and other fields. And they can certainly interfere with maintenance and play on our turf fields. They are a major nuisance, they are aggressive and will sting repeatedly. And there's no world in which we can just completely eradicate fire ants. And so the goal is just to maintain them in a safe manner for how we are using that turf. And the ways we do that is by treating the mounds individually, we can use broadcast treatments that in turf systems can certainly help take out other pests like grubs and then we have baits. And right now, baits are really the best option for firing control. It's, let's see, end of March. And so typically at this point we have warm enough soil temperatures and weather that the ants are forging and active. And what you see here is this is an example of a fire ant bait. It's a corn grit or something similar impregnated with an insecticide that the fire ants bring back to their mound and it gets much slower control. Sometimes it takes four to six weeks but it's much longer control. And if you have a problematic area and you bait regularly once or twice a year, then that will certainly help reduce populations. And so you can sometimes reduce baiting to once or no times a year. There's lots of different products whether you're using broadcast or mound or bait treatments. And a lot of decisions come down to what is the area used for? How quickly do you need control? What are you willing to spend? If we do have high infestation areas we will need to do multiple treatments and the nature of fire ants and the way they move. We do have mating flights that produce new queens they'll fall to the ground and make new mounds. And so we may have to do pop-up treatments throughout the year but we have a lot of products available and I'm happy to discuss with anyone further what would work specifically for your operation. And lastly, I didn't go into detail on chemical control and a lot of these insects but all of our products are listed in our TERF IPM guide and the thing with TERF systems is that not all products are labeled for different sites in TERF and so they're very specific on the labels and those labels are a mouthful and so if you have questions and want some help deciphering and figuring out what is the best product to use based on your area how much human or animal exposure you have in that area to TERF and subsequently pesticides we can certainly chat about that. And so I'm just at 10 minutes and so there's my contact information and I'm happy to chat TERF insects with anyone as questions come up through the summer.