Looking for Cereal Leaf Beetle Infested Fields

By Jaime Cummings

Many of you in certain parts of NY experience damage and losses to your small grains crops from the Cereal Leaf Beetle.  It is considered a primary pest of concern wherever it infests a field.  We started a project in 2019 to investigate the potential for biocontrol of this pest, and it yielded promising results, which some of you may have seen shared at various crop congresses and other extension venues this past winter (Fig 1.).

Figure 1. Collection efforts in 2019 to identify cereal leaf beetle parasitoid populations in NY

We confirmed the presence of the biocontrol parasitoid wasp, Tetrastichus julis, in a number of fields in 2019, including a high population of them in one location in Tompkins County (Fig. 2).  Cereal leaf beetle larvae were collected, parasitism levels were determined, and were then released at the Musgrave Research Farm in Cayuga County.  The goal is to build this population of parasitoids and use it as a reservoir for future releases in areas affected by the cereal leaf beetle pest over the next several years.

Figure 2. Parasitism levels of collected cereal leaf beetle populations in NY in 2019.