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AMARILLO – Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Entomologist Dr. Ed Bynum will be part of a new grant from the Southern Region Integrated Pest Management program (S-RIPM) to help develop an integrated management program for mite-vectored diseases of wheat.

Wheat streak mosaic – a virus spread from plant to plant by mites – is the focus of the new grant received by Dr. Charlie Rush, Texas A&M AgriLife Research plant pathologist in Amarillo.

The grant, provided through the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture through the SRIPM program, will help researchers update 1950s and 1960s technology and methods currently used to control mites and diseases they transmit, Rush said.

The primary methods of control in place since the wheat curl mite was discovered have been to plant wheat later and control volunteer wheat in the off-season, he said.

“Both of those are still relevant, but a cattleman planting wheat for grazing can’t wait to plant, and not everyone can control the volunteer sources around them, such as Conservation Reserve Program grass fields and other places that serve as an over-summer host for the mites,” Rush said.

The need exists to come up with some new ideas, as there are no new miticides for control of the wheat curl mite, he said.

“And even if there were, growers don’t know when to control,” Rush said. “Through our grant, we will screen new chemistries coming on the market and evaluate them for efficacy.

“But we also will be going to work to understand mite ecology and epidemiology – where do they build up, why and when do they move – so we can determine how to best protect your crop.”

Ultimately, the team would like to develop an economic threshold for the mite/virus.

The two-year grant begins September 1 with two components: $140,000 for research and another $35,000 for Extension efforts.

The team will include Rush; Dr. Ed Bynum, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service entomologist in Amarillo; and graduate and undergraduate students, all doing the research.  Brian McCornack, Kansas State University, and Bob Hunger and Tom Royer, both with Oklahoma State University, will be working on the Extension efforts.

“The goal is never to completely eliminate but rather to control at an economic level,” Rush said. “This has not been done for mite-vectored diseases.”

The grant was developed to answer questions for growers who would say they knew they had wheat streak virus in their fields and knew it would spread, but didn’t know if they should continue to apply water and fertilizer.

“The answer would depend on when we got the call,” Rush said. “We realized we needed a better understanding of how disease presence at a particular time would affect yield.”

With precision agriculture efforts that are already in place, producers are able to treat portions of the field according to need, he said. What is missing is how to determine the need.

Rush and his AgriLife Research plant pathology team have been working to describe disease development, whether it was wheat streak mosaic or a related virus, triticum mosaic. Starting in the fall of 2012, wheat plots were checked every week and hot spots were monitored to see how the natural gradient of mites moved.

“We made disease ratings with a hand-held hyperspectral ground spectrometer and monitored disease development and then correlated that to yield results,” he said. “We were able to get some extremely encouraging results.”

They were able to see where mechanically inoculated plants infected at specific times other than those with natural infestations differed in the progress of the gradient spread.

“We found that if you have infestations of mites at a particular time, early in the season with high temperatures, you will have disease development. If it is too cold, the virus appears to not survive in the plants.

“We also found if a field gets the disease after mid-April, and it wasn’t there before, it looks like that would be late enough for the farmer to continue to apply inputs such as water and fertilizer and maintain yield,” Rush said.

He said the goal is, after a year or two, “we will be able to tell producers more specifics to help them know when and where to apply inputs. This way we can provide farmers with a tool to manage their fields in a site-specific manner, and not waste money on disease management.”

Rush’s team also will work to plug in their information with the iWheat program that is being developed by another group of researchers to make a mobile scouting and disease forecasting risk assessment model.

COLLEGE STATION, Texas – With the fall semester underway  the College held its ceremony for COALS awards and faculty and students in Department of Entomology received recognition.

Professor Dr. Patricia Pietrantonio and Ph.D. student Suhas Vyavhare were honored in front of their colleagues and peers during an annual awards ceremony for faculty, staff and students on Thursday at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ awards ceremony at the AgriLife Center.

Pietrantonio received the Dean’s Outstanding Achievement Award for Faculty Mentoring.  A seventeen year veteran faculty member with the Department, Pietrantonio was the second female faculty member the Department had hired at that time. Pietrantonio received the award for her outstanding work over the years as a  mentor for many faculty, graduate and undergraduate student she has worked with during her career.

She has been involved in various activities supporting diversity and mentoring, including the National Science Foundation-funded ADVANCE subcommittee for Women of Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), in which she served as a mentor for a minority female faculty member in the above fields. She has also been invited several times by the Dean of Faculty to provide orientation talks to all newly appointed Department Heads and deans on issues facing minority faculty mentoring and share her experiences.

“To be chosen for such an important award speaks to her commitment to promote women in STEM fields and educate administrators about the unique challenges that women and underrepresented minorities face in academia,” Entomology Department Head Dr. David Ragsdale said.

Several of her colleagues stated that Pietrantonio has helped them grow in their careers and been a positive influence to them, including Dr. Keyan Zhu-Salzman, Dr. Albert Mulenga and Dr. Cecilia Tamborindeguy. She also has positively influenced several of her students as well, including success stories from several of her graduate students that have gone to work at multi-national corporations such as Dow AgroSciences and Monsanto, as well as a faculty position at a university in Taiwan.

Dr. Pietrantonio is an exemplary role model for female faculty and graduate students. The Department of Entomology has historically been dominated by male faculty, Salzman said.  As the first Hispanic female faculty member, Dr. Pietrantonio has made the most significant contributions in changing the work environment in this Department, which has greatly benefited the female faculty recruited later,” Zhu-Salzman said.  “Her energy and passion has influenced women around her, not only the faculty but the students and postdocs in her classes and in her lab. After training in her lab, many of them are very successful in academia and in their research field, which in turn positively reflected upon the Department, AgriLife and TAMU.”

Vyavhare, who is co-advised by Dr. Raul Medina in College Station and Dr. M.O. Way in Beaumont, received the Dean’s Outstanding Achievement Award for Graduate Research.  Vyavhare’s research interest focuses on the red-banded stinkbug.  He is relating infestations of the insect to damage of soybeans at specific growth stages through various studies. He is also correlating the densities of stinkbugs in the field with sweep net counts and sweep net surveys to determine relative abundance of the insects throughout soybean producing areas in the Texas Upper Gulf Coast, as well as evaluating degrees of insecticide resistance in the pest.

The results of Vyavhare’s research will provide valuable information including revised action threshold for the stinkbugs, which will help producers to fine-tune decision making on proper use of management tactics.

Vyavhare also is involved in several organizations, including the Entomology Graduate Student Organization, the Graduate Teaching Academy and the Indian Graduate Students Organization, as well as the Entomological Society of America.

He also earned the National Excellence in Leadership Award by the National Society of Leadership and Success in 2010, placed first for his poster presentation, and an outstanding participant  in the Linnaean games competition at the Annual Meeting of the Southwestern Branch of the Entomological Society of America.  Vyavhare and other members of the Linnaean team will represent Texas A&M at the annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America to be held this November in Austin, TX.

“Suhas is a Ph.D. student with a remarkable work ethic,” Medina said. “He is  mature, personable and dedicated to his research.”

Way was proud of Vyavhare and said his dedication and hard work will definitely benefit everyone, including growers and integrated pest management.

“I consider Suhas my best student. He is bright, hardworking and cooperative, Way said. “I believe Suhas will become a top-notch scientist helping develop and implement integrated pest management (IPM) programs for future global food production so vital for the sustainability/preservation of a stable, healthy world community.”

Texas A&M Agriculture and Life Sciences Vice Chancellor and Dean Dr. Mark Hussey was very proud of this year’s honorees.

“One of my goals is to recognize and reward excellence in our faculty, staff and students. Together, your dedication fulfills the land-grant mission and makes us one of the leading colleges not just at Texas A&M but around the world,” Hussey said.

COLLEGE STATION, Texas – The Department of Entomology at Texas A&M is proud to announce Dr. Ian Kaplan as the 2013 Perry Adkisson Distinguished Seminar Speaker during its fall semester seminar series on Thursday, September 26.

As an assistant professor of entomology at Purdue University, Kaplan’s research focuses on ecological approaches to pest management for vegetable crops. His lab works on various projects ranging from basic to applied research and represents various topics such as specific emphases on biological control, plant-insect interactions and chemical ecology.

Kaplan recently was one of 96 researchers in the United States who received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Barack Obama in 2012. The award is the highest governmental honor that is bestowed on scientists and engineers.

Kaplan received his Bachelor of Science degree in Biology from Davidson College, his Master of Science in Entomology from Auburn, and his Ph.D. in Entomology from the University of Maryland.

Ph.D. student and EGSO member Paul Lenhart said that Dr. Kaplan was a good fit for this award because he is an exceptional up-and-coming star in the field of plant-insect interactions.

“He is incredibly productive and has found many interesting biological interactions among common crop pests in agroecosystems,” Lenhart said. “He is definitely a model for all entomology graduate students.”

Given every fall, the Perry Adkisson Distinguished Seminar Speaker Award recognizes outstanding researchers in the field of entomology and gives graduate students and the community the opportunity to hear the latest research from leading scientists.

The award is named for Dr. Perry Adkisson, former head of the Department and of the Texas A&M University Chancellor. During his career, Adkisson was an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the first ever recipient of all three of the world’s major prizes in agriculture, the Alexander von Humboldt Award, the Wolf Prize, and the World Food Prize. Along with Dr. Ray Smith, he developed what is now known as IPM or Integrated Pest Management.

For more information about the award, visit the Perry Adkisson Distinguished Seminar Speaker Award page on the Entomology Graduate Student Organization’s website at http://egso.tamu.edu/awards/
adkissonaward/index.php

COLLEGE STATION, Texas—The Department of Entomology’s graduate students shared their research results at the sixteenth annual Graduate Student Forum on Wednesday, August 21, 2013.

The forum is designed to provide a venue for the Department’s graduate students to practice speaking to an audience of their peers about their research and encourages them to share more openly with their colleagues and other academic community members.

During the forum, students were allowed a total of 15 minutes per student with 12 minutes presentation time and a few minutes for the audience to ask questions.

“This is a wonderful place to expose your research to your peers,” said Dr. Raul Medina during the introductions to the students. “This is a friendly forum and a great opportunity for you to show everyone what you have been doing.”

Department Head Dr. David Ragsdale encouraged students to keep focusing their research to meet the five Grand Challenges that has been implemented throughout the departments in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Ragsdale said that this forum was a great opportunity to develop their skills as a scientist who must become comfortable speaking in front of an audience of their peers as well as speaking to the public to get people excited about their research.

Audience members also had a chance to speak with three of the Department’s faculty members during a special panel session with Drs. Albert Mulenga, Greg Sword and Aaron Tarone.

Some of the topics asked included how they selected postdoctoral research associates for their labs, handling rejection and preparing for life after graduation.

The first place award for best presentation went to Ph.D. candidate Meaghan Pimsler for her research presentation titled “Elucidation of the sex-determination pathways in an organism with monogenic sex determination”.

Ph.D. student Kyle Harrison then received second place for his presentation titled “The role of immigrant inviability in mediating the genetic differentiation between populations of Aphidoidea species associated with pecan and water hickory trees”

The third place prize was awarded to Marion LeGall for her presentation “Local host plants and diet mixing: effects of plant chemistry on a generalist herbivore at the population level”

The top three winners received a certificate and a monetary award.