Learning to Love Leftovers

Abstract

Each year, federal and state agencies, including universities, conduct field surveys for invasive species in an attempt to detect new introductions early in the invasion process. National surveys for invasive insects are administered and coordinated by the United States Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service-Plant Protection and Quarantine (USDA-APHIS-PPQ) and the Forest Service through Farm Bill § 10007 (www.aphis.usda.gov), the Cooperative Agricultural Pest Survey (CAPS) (caps.ceris.purdue.edu), and Early Detection Rapid Response (EDRR) (www.fs.fed.us/invasivespecies) programs. Thousands of traps are placed annually and monitored usually every one to two weeks throughout the U.S., mostly during the time of expected pest activity. These extensive trapping and monitoring efforts have led to improved pest detection and management and have supported additional pest-related research (e.g., Cranshaw 2011). Fortunately, these proactive and preventive program activities have resulted in few detections of new invasive species, at least relative to the number of traps, collection periods, and total number of specimens in samples. On the contrary, non-target insects are frequently captured in traps and some insects are caught in high numbers. This is because monitoring traps are generally non-selective and pheromone lures used to attract insects to traps vary in their selectivity. Unfortunately, these unintentionally trapped insects (termed “by-catch”) are typically discarded, in part, because the federal databases only seek information regarding presence/absence of invasive species and funding usually does not cover evaluation of by-catch. Further, there is no centralized venue for reporting information on these leftover insects, even though many of them are of agricultural, forestry, and urban importance. Consequently, a concerted …