European Gypsy Moth Heads West

With your Fruit Grower Report, I'm Susan Allen. While we didn't have an Asian Gypsy moth issues in the Northwest this year, the European Gypsy Moth apparently made it's way West. Karla Salp

Community Outreach & Environmental Education Specialist from Washington State Department of Agriculture explains

SALP: The people that are living over there with those infestations can transport egg masses into Washington when they are moving from infested states. So that may explain why there has been such a wide dispersal of those catches, but we don't really know for sure.

She says their next step is to go back to areas they have caught the gypsy moths and look for eggs.

Our next steps are to conduct an egg mass survey so what that means is we will go into areas where we caught gypsy moths and looked for egg masses they would leave behind if there were an egg producing population there. Once we have the egg mass survey data, we will use that as well as our catch data to determine if and where we may need to conduct treatments in 2017. So that decision has not been made yet and it won't be made for a while, yet we still need to get more data on the egg mass survey collections as well as complete our gypsy moth trapping. Which isn't quite done yet

So that is the update for the gypsy moth, 2016 so if you have any questions don't hesitate to call or shoot me an email. Karla Salp, Washington State Department of Agriculture Office: (360) 902-2178

Community Outreach & Environmental Education Specialist