By Emily Unglesbee
DTN Staff Reporter
For more than two decades, Joe Spencer has spent many a summer evening standing atop 30-foot-tall towers above corn fields, trying to catch adult Western corn rootworm beetles as they buzz by looking for a place to lay eggs.
Lately, he?s been a little lonely up there.
?Populations are pretty low right now,? said the University of Illinois entomologist, who works for the Illinois Natural History Survey. Widespread rainfall during rootworm egg hatch in June 2015 led to a major collapse in many Corn Belt rootworm populations.
Spencer is worried the lull in rootworm feeding might lure growers into a feeling of false security. After all, this is a pest that cost the industry up to $2 billion a year at its peak. Moreover, when it does surface in fields, the rootworm is increasingly problematic, Spencer said. It has evolved resistance to all four of the Bt traits on the market that target it, and new technology is still at least a couple of years down the road.
