2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38
The cruciferous fire moth lives everywhere, but it is most harmful in the forest-steppe and woodlands. Rapeseed, radish, cabbage, celery, beets, spinach, horseradish and sorrel, this pest affects with equal force. The main harm is caused by gluttonous caterpillars, devouring leaves of cultivated plants with appetite. Most often, numerous holes in the leaves of growing crops indicate the presence of a cruciferous fire moth on the site. If any were noticed, it's time to start the fight
Meet the pest
The cruciferous moth is a rather graceful butterfly, with a wingspan ranging from 24 to 27 mm. The front double-yellow wings of the pests are decorated with indistinct patterns and oblique strokes of dark brown shades, and their hind wings are yellowish-gray in color.
Oval flattened eggs of cruciferous wild moths reach 0.3-0.4 mm in size and are painted in pale yellow tones. Caterpillars grow in length from 17 to 20 mm and are endowed with greenish-brown shields and heads. On the sides of the little body of caterpillars, pale yellowish stripes can be seen, and on their backs there are two light longitudinal stripes. As for the color of the body as a whole, it can vary from yellowish-brownish shades to yellowish-greenish. And the size of pale brown pupae is up to 16 mm.
The caterpillars' wintering place is the surface soil layer - it is there that they settle in rather dense cocoons. The voracious parasites pupate in May, and the emergence of butterflies can be observed already at the end of May or at the beginning of June. Graceful butterflies willingly fly into the light and are especially active at night and at dusk. Eggs are laid by females in groups, each of which includes from two to thirty pieces. And the main place of dislocation of eggs is the lower surfaces of the leaves of cabbage and a number of other crops. The total fertility of females reaches sixty eggs.
In about a week and a half, tiny caterpillars will begin to appear from the laid eggs, forming loose spider nests. First, they eat delicate leaves, and a little later they gnaw through holes in them. And upon reaching the third age, caterpillars penetrate into the inner parts of growing crops: they bite into heads of cabbage and concentrate on the inner leaves. As a rule, the development of first generation caterpillars takes from eighteen to thirty days.
During pupation, caterpillars deepen into the surface soil layer. And a small part of them pupate directly on the plants - this is usually the case with caterpillars of the first generation. In twenty to twenty five days, butterflies of the second generation fly out. If dry weather sets in during their summer, the females become sterile, the laid eggs dry up, and in general the population size decreases sharply. The development of individuals of the second generation proceeds in the same way as in individuals of the first generation. Caterpillars of the second generation, having finished their feeding in the fall, go to winter in the soil. Only two generations of cruciferous moths develop per year.
How to fight
Removing weeds from the site and deep autumn plowing are the main preventive measures against cruciferous wild moths. During the period of mass pupation of harmful caterpillars, systematic loosening of the soil is also carried out. And at the stage of laying eggs, graceful pests often practice the release of trichograms, and they are usually released in two or three steps.
Treatment with insecticides or biological products is carried out if there are from three to five caterpillars for each plant or the total population of growing crops with harmful parasites reaches ten percent.
Under natural conditions, Apanteles lioneola Curt, parasitizing on the voracious caterpillars of pests, contribute to the reduction of the cruciferous wild moth population.
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