Pink Bollworm - Invasive Species

387 Words2 Pages
Unit 2 Individual Work 1 Environmental Science The pink bollworm is invasive species that I’ve decided to use for this weeks’ assignment. This species is a pest to all cotton farmers. Pink bollworms are a native of somewhere in Southern Asia, but it was first detected in Texas cotton in 1917. The source was traced to cottonseeds shipped from Mexico to Texas. Now they are all over the world in countries such as Pakistan. The adult pink bollworm is a small, thin, gray moth with fringed wings. The larva is a dull white, eight-legged caterpillar with conspicuous pink banding along its dorsum. The larva reaches one half inch in length.” It resembles a caterpillar. The only difference is the fact that it is pink. Its life cycle is the same as any butterfly/moth. The caterpillar forms a pupa or cocoon, then after a couple of weeks it transforms into a moth. Then they mate and replicate. This high rate of reproduction makes it really hard to ward off this species from just being an insect, to becoming an all out travesty. There are a lot of pests who potentially ruin crops, but the pink bollworm ruins cotton crops the worst. They feed on the seed which enable the crops to grow, and they destroy the lint quality as well. It leaves yellow spots/stains in the lint, therefore has to be sold at a discounted rate on the international market. (Ahmad, n.d.) These insects impact are so devastating because different types of methods have been tried in order to prevent infestation, but none prevailed. The latest method of sterilizing the males was supposed to prevent them from fertilizing the female eggs. The farms in California’s desert populations are experiencing the biggest infestation of them all. Non-native species usually are more detrimental to places they are not from. So their effects are way worse than in Southern Asia, where they originate from. In
Open Document