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Funded Project

Funding Program: Integrated Pest Management Competitive Grants Program

Project Title: Sex in the Orchard: Determining mating success of sterile codling moth with molecular markers

Project Director (PD): William Cooper [1]

Lead State: WA Lead Organization: USDA-Agricultural Research Service

Undesignated Funding: $29,724

Start Date: Mar-01-2019 End Date: Feb-29-2020

Summary: This project addresses a critical information gap for the key pest of pome fruit, codling moth. This pest is still considered the highest research priority of Washington stakeholders, despite decades of research progress in pheromone mating disruption. While successful, there are increasing reports of higher levels of damage in existing programs. There has been increasing interest in the past few years to supplement existing control programs based on mating disruption with sterile insect release (SIR), an option made possible by the excess production of sterile codling moths by the Okanagan-Kootenay Sterile Insect Release program in British Columbia (BC). Because of the prevalence of mating disruption in Washington pome fruit orchards (>90% of the apple acreage), it is crucial to understand the compatibility (synergism, antagonism, additive effects) of these two techniques before large-scale implementation of SIR. We propose the development of a molecular technique to determine mating success of wild females with wild vs sterile males using molecular characterization of the spermatophore. The BC colony has been in continuous production since the early 1990s, and may have undergone genetic bottlenecks that differentiate it from wild types. Such a technique would allow the use of the new kairomone-added bi-sex traps to capture females and determine mating status over a broad spatial and temporal scale. Results of these studies would inform future directions of research in adoption of SIR, and especially the contribution of each technique to overall control. The approach may also be useful to other lepidopteran species currently being evaluated for SIR. This Objectives: Objective 1: Confirm variation in the COI sequences between codling moth from the Osoyoos colony and wild populations. Objective 2: Demonstrate that mating success of sterile males from the Osoyoos colony with females from wild populations can be determined with molecular markers.

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