Kudzu Bug

Last week I was in Charleston, South Carolina at the National Association of County Agricultural Agents (NACAA) Annual Meeting. Like most conferences there was a social aspect to it but there was a fair amount of educational content too.

One of the most interesting training opportunities I participated in was a tour of South Carolina's Coastal Plains Agriculture. I expected it to be interesting. What I didn't expect was to find it highly relevant to Indiana.

One of the research trials, being conducted by Dr. Jeremy Greene of Clemson University at their Edisto Research Farm, was on the kudzu bug, Megacopta cribraria. I had heard of this insect, vaguely, but hadn't paid much attention to it. I was much more alert after seeing it in action.

Kudzu bug first appeared in the US in 2009 in 9 counties in northern Georgia. Over the next three years it spread to South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, Virginia, Florida, Tennessee, and Mississippi. The kudzu bug is a voracious feeder on kudzu and can reduce its growth by as much as a third, which is good. However it also feeds on soybeans and can reduce yields by up to 80% if left untreated.

This is an unwanted invader and every time researchers find out more about it, it gets a little worse for the midwest. Initially they believed it required kudzu as a host to complete its life cycle. It does not. It gets along just fine living off soybeans and overwintering. The second discovery is that while Dr. Greene believes there probably is a place where it's too cold for this pest to overwinter, he doesn't think this is Indiana. The kudzu bug overwinters as an adult and hides under tree bark, soil residue, grass and hay. In the spring the female emerges, lays her eggs on the underside of leaves and the nymphs hatch and begin to feed.

The kudzu bug nymph is not a pod feeder or defoliator but a stem feeder. It latches onto the stem and starts sucking the juice out of it. At the Edisto Farm test plot, the nymphs were absolutely double parked on the stems.

Kudzu Bug Nymphs on Soybeans. Thanks to Laura Watts of Penn State for sending me some photos (I forgot to bring my camera).

There are effective treatments for this pest and hopefully these can be mixed with herbicide applications. Kudzu bug certainly won't have any impact on us for this year and it would have to move a long way to be a problem in 2013. However it appears to be coming and from the research findings so far, Indiana winters won't be a problem for it.

You can find additional information at the Kudzu Bug page. Doug Johnson from the University of Kentucky also recently posted about it.