Last week, during my research into this week’s Light Brown Apple Moth story, a couple of sources spoke off the record about research that they intimated will prove that the LBAM risk is overstated. Today that research was released and its authors claim that LBAM is controlled by naturalpredators, a claim based on what the authors describe as a fact-finding tour to New Zealand. (New Zealand is also where the California Department of Food and Agriculture and the US Department of Ag are currently conducting trials on a new, longer lasting, pheromone spray.)
In a press release sent to the Guardian, Dr. Daniel Harder, botanist and Executive Director of the University of California at Santa Cruz Arboretum, and Jeff Rosendale, a Watsonville grower and horticulturalist, said that during a three-week, 3,000-kilometer fact-finding study in New Zealand, they earned that “80 to 90 percent of LBAM larvae are destroyed by natural predators and never mature.”
The report’s authors also said they also spoke with current research experts on LBAM in New Zealand’s government agricultural agency, HortResearch.
“The success of New Zealand agriculture and horticulture professionals in controlling LBAM and other leaf-roller pests using Integrated pest management techniques and few or no chemical applications is a model of best IPM practices that can be readily adopted in California to control LBAM,” the report’s authors stated .