Dr. Parajulee's Cotton Entomology Program Staff and Graduate Students. From left to right: Abhilash Balachandran, Ram Shrestha, Teri Cross, Stan Carroll, Chen Chen, Owen McSpadden, Bo Kesey, Anup Bastola, Mahendra Adhikari, and Colin Richards.
Megha Parajulee checking a cotton plant for fleahoppers.
Ram Shrestha, a doctoral student in Dr. Parajulee’s program, is setting up a mark-release-recapture study of western tarnished plant bug to determine their intercrop movement ecology.
Graduate students and summer workers contribute to laboratory rearing and releasing of known number of insects on plants to evaluate the damage potential of major cotton pests.
Parajulee setting up an overwintering cage for a Lygus bug overwintering study.
Cotton Research Saves Texas High Plains Farmers From Insect Pests
by Rob Williams
April 23, 2008
Cotton pest management is key when it comes to the state's top commodity. Texas AgriLife Research is helping to keep the crops protected from insect damage.
Dr. Megha Parajulee, Associate Professor with Texas AgriLife Research in Lubbock, has been working with one of the most important crops in the Texas High Plains area for seven years.
A native of Nepal, Parajulee grew up on a small farm and received his Associate Degree in Agriculture from the Institute of Agriculture in Nepal and Bachelor of Science in Agricultural Economics from H.P. Agricultural University in India in 1987. Parajulee then received his Masters (1991) and PhD (1994) in Entomology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Before coming to Texas AgriLife Research, Parajulee was a postdoctoral research associate for the Department in 1994 and a research associate with the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station in Vernon. While in Vernon, he worked on boll weevil ecology, the use of relay-strip cropping systems to enhance natural suppression of insect pests in cotton, and integrated pest management approach to cotton.
Parajulee has a joint appointment as with Texas AgriLife Research and Texas Tech University's Department of Plant and Soil Science. He has been working with AgriLife Research since September of 2001.
A major portion of Parajulee's research deals with any and all cotton pests, including cotton fleahoppers, thrips, and Lygus bugs, as well as bollworms and cotton aphids.
Parajulee is currently studying the ecology and behavior of Lygus bugs, with several sub-projects in this area, including developing landscape-level pest management guidelines to reduce infestation of Lygus bugs in cotton. The objective is to survey cotton fields, as well as surrounding habitats within 3 kilometers, or 1.8 miles, of the cotton fields for abundance of Lygus bugs.
Parajulee is also studying other factors impacting Lygus bugs, including the influence of non cotton hosts on the life history characteristics of the insects, compensation of Lygus and fleahopper-induced fruit loss, and searching for a susceptibility window for Lygus hesperus in cotton bolls.
The outcome of Parajulee's past projects have helped High Plains producers to understand which alternate weed hosts support Lygus and what triggers Lygus movement to cotton plants. Parajulee, along with Associate Professor and Extension Entomologist David Kerns, have educated cotton producers on how to prevent Lygus bugs from moving to cotton plants by mowing roadside, non-cotton weeds and vegetation to 6 inches high.
He also has improved Lygus management procedures by making biological information available about the insect to crop consultants and Extension Agents - integrated pest management (IPM). Producers use the information from the consultants and Extension to develop pest management plans that have helped significantly reduce the environmental and pesticide costs for producers.
Some of his other projects are studying the effects of soil applied nitrogen on cotton arthropod populations in a crop watered with a drip-irrigation system, and developing a treatment threshold for western flower thrips in cotton.
Parajulee and Kerns have also worked together to develop pest management options that incorporate new technology. After two years of irrigated research trials evaluating merits of Bt technology in the High Plains for managing bollworm infestations, the team has learned that Bollgard varieties have increased yield and profitability over $100 an acre compared to non-Bollgard/non Bt varieties. Parajulee said Bollgard technology adoption has increased to 60% after the trial period.