Whitefly research helps cotton producers - Texas A&M Uni
31 Jan '07
3 min read
"Crawlers" hatch from the eggs after about 10 days and settle in the caged area; they will not move again until they complete development as adults. This allows Toothaker to remove the cage after two weeks and count the number of "settled" nymphs every day until all of the whiteflies have emerged as adults or died.
Plants' resistance can show up in a couple of ways: The eggs will not hatch or the insects will not live to adulthood. By counting repeatedly, she can compare plants within a race stock to determine the variability in mortality. In other words, if more whiteflies consistently die on the race stocks than on the control group, which is a couple of varieties planted now, it exhibits the characteristics of resistance, she said.
She is in the process of harvesting the bolls of cotton to retrieve the seeds. Those seeds will be turned over the cotton breeding lab for further research work with Dr. C. Wayne Smith, professor with the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station. Her work is supported by a grant from Cotton Incorporated and recently earned a first place in the master's students' oral presentations at the Beltwide Cotton Conference in New Orleans.
Toothaker hopes to graduate from Texas A&M in August and work as a crop consultant. "Maggie understands production agriculture," said Dr. Marvin Harris, Experiment Station professor and chair of her graduate committee.
"Maggie's fine work today is also a firm foundation for a successful career in production agriculture for decades to come," Harris said. "I knew I wanted to be in agriculture at the age of 11, so I've known I wanted to go to (Texas) A&M since I was 11," said Toothaker, who graduated with a bachelor's degree in agronomy and entomology a couple of years ago. I like being in the middle of a cotton field in the middle of nowhere."
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