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Permanent Control of Pest Mole Crickets (Orthoptera: Gryllotalpidae: Scapteriscus ) in Florida

2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: 52; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ae/52.3.138

2155-9902

J. Howard Frank, Thomas J. Walker,

Hemiptera Insect Studies

ole crickets are strange insects.Their powerful forelegs let them bury themselves in sand in seconds.Like moles, they live in the ground.In spring, winged adults emerge from the ground and fly in swarms after sundown, looking for mates and new ground where they can produce offspring.Males tune their burrow entrances as loudspeakers that amplify and direct their calling songs skyward.The louder they sing, the more females (and competing males) they attract.There are four species of mole crickets in Florida.The northern mole cricket, Neocurtilla hexadactyla (Perty) (subfamily Gryllotalpinae), is a native species, not a pest, and not closely related to the three South American invaders.The invaders are the shortwinged mole cricket (Scapteriscus abbreviatus Scudder), southern mole cricket (S. borellii Giglio-Tos), and tawny mole cricket (S. vicinus Scudder; subfamily Scapteriscinae).All are pests, but the tawny mole cricket (Fig. 1) is the worst.Its adults fly, so they disperse readily.It eats roots and leaves of grass, especially of Florida's pasture-and turfgrasses; it destroys tomato, cabbage, eggplant, and bell pepper seedlings.Like the southern mole cricket, it also kills plants by disturbing their roots so that they become desiccated.Like the tawny mole cricket, the shortwinged mole cricket is a damaging herbivore, but it cannot fly and has a restricted distribution.The southern mole cricket has spread widely, but is more of a predator than a phytophage.The specialist native wasp Larra analis F. and the nematode Steinernema neocurtillae, which attack the northern mole cricket, do no harm to the invaders.Generalist natural enemies attack the invaders, but do not inflict enough mortality to control them (Hudson et al. 1988).When these three invaders became problems in Florida in 1899-1924, poisoned baits were used against them.Baits had to be applied year after year, and yet the mole crickets spread.In 1940, a federal emergency relief program gave 1,258 tons of arsenical bait to Florida vegetable growers in 12 counties.A low-key biological control research program was conducted for a few years in the 1940s, but was terminated when chlordane was found to control mole crickets cheaply and persistently.In the 1970s, chlordane was banned by the U.S. EPA because of the environmental harm it caused.Florida cattle ranchers were devastated because they could not afford the more expensive chemicals that were available for use against mole crickets in turf and vegetables, and they called on the state legislature to act.