Campus News

A new plan for de-bugging

John Ruberson, a professor in the entomology department, was quoted in an AgroTimes article about a new “green” pesticide that kills the larva of lime swallowtail caterpillars, which have been threatening the citrus industry by devastating crops.

“This is a neat idea, and I’m hoping that more work will be done on this in the future because there’s a lot of potential there,” Ruberson said. “The one challenge I can see from a grower’s perspective is that it tends to work kind of slowly. Typically, it takes two to three days to kill the insect, but they do show that [insect] feeding is reduced, which is a good thing.”