Spatial Relationships of Cotton Pests in the South Texas Landscape

The cotton fleahopper and the verde plant bug (Hemiptera: Miridae) have become more problematic in recent years in the cotton growing region of South Texas. They feed on reproductive tissue: squares (cotton fleahopper) and young bolls (verde plant bug). Feeding during these stages can cause severe damage to the final cotton yield as well as introduce cotton boll rot. A pest management issue is that outbreaks vary from year to year and their densities vary from field to field. Edges and ecotones are often used in landscape ecology to aid in interpreting the functional heterogeneity of an organism; in the case of these cotton insects, how the surrounding landscape effects their population occurrence and movement from squaring through flowering. The goal of this study was to investigate the spatial relationships with these pest populations to get a better understanding of why some of these pests are present in some areas and not present in others. Our study found an edge effect for both verde plant bugs and cotton fleahoppers (more bugs were found nearer to the field edge) and ecotone modifies the strength of the edge effect. Edge effect was more predominant in the cotton/natural habitat ecotone than the others. This information can prove to be useful in pest management as it may help managers focus on fields or areas of fields that may be of higher risk to colonization by these pests.