Boll weevil transport to and survival in cotton gin

1)  Boll weevil transport to and survival in cotton gin.   The field work for this project is nearly complete.  I will be meeting Orlando and Veronica in Lubbock at Alan Brashear’s lab the week of Mar. 9 to conduct three experiments that are yet to be completed: 

            1.  Four more replications of BW survival in pouches inserted at different levels inside a cotton module for 1, 3, and 7 days.

            2.  Determining critical tie-out density for complete mortality in mote bales.

            3.  Survival of BW through inclined cleaners during cotton pre-cleaning process.

Cooperators include Megha Parajulee, Stan Carroll, and Mark Arnold of Tex A&M, Lubbock.

I anticipate this will be the last trip necessary to Lubbock, although it is still possible that we won’t quite get finished and will have to make one more trip.

Orlando, Veronica, and Valia will continue to sort through bagged samples of cotton taken from module builders in 2001 to search for boll weevils.  Processing the samples for 2002 has been completed – the 2001 bags they must go through now were originally intended to be processed by Arnold and Carroll in Lubbock, but with a change in their leadership, they were unable to complete the task.