Big moth flights bring back old memories

Big moth flight Friday night of Helicoverpa zea moths. They are mating.

These moths will lay their eggs on plants in the next few days, and about a week later worms will hatch out of the eggs. Depending on which plant the momma moth decided to lay her eggs on, these worms will be corn worms, tomato fruit worms, cotton boll worms, tobacco bud worms, etc. They are the same worm.

When my dad was growing cotton in the ’90s, before it was a genetically modified organism, the county ag agents would set up black-light traps to monitor the various moth flights throughout the summer.

When a certain threshold of moths were trapped, three days later it was time to start scouting the cotton. That was my job. What that involved was walking through a cotton field randomly pulling off 100 terminal buds, the very top of the plant. Then you would go sit in the shade and go through the samples looking at the bottom of the leaves for moth eggs. If you found just two eggs per 100 samples, it was time to spray that field.

I did not much care for that, because once you start spraying, you wipe out all the beneficial insects like lady bugs, lacewings, etc. that were feeding on the moth eggs and then the only option is to continue to spray. That was my job also.

I would see my neighbors loading up their sprayers in shorts and sneakers but I always wore a Tyvek suit, rubber gloves, goggles and a respirator, because I had read the damn label on the jug and knew I was spraying what was basically a nerve poison.

But no one scouts cotton anymore because the insecticide is genetically engineered into each cotton plant.

This story was originally published August 17, 2015 at 4:13 PM with the headline "Big moth flights bring back old memories."