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“Bt kills about 70-80 percent of the larvae. It’s like spraying people with a flu bug,” Mr. Haskell said.
Shenandoah National Park’s gypsy moth integrated pest management plan notes that mechanical controls (scraping egg masses, burlap banding and pupal case destruction) will be employed in small, low density infestations. In addition, native predators — the white-footed mouse, shrews^ stripedskunljts, toads, frogs arid ground *beetles' — will be encouraged and* wasps that feed on the larvae will be imported.
For the long term, “well slowly remove the trees that the gypsy moths really like and replace them with those they don’t,” Mr. Haskell said. This vegetation manipulation will involve swapping oaks — which make up 70 percent of the park’s forest — for maple, white pine, ash and hickory. “That’s a combination that’s very distasteful (to the gypsy moth caterpillars),” the resource specialist noted.
Last year, the park had more than two million visitors. As part of the gypsy moth control program, those visitors will undergo vehicle searches in an attempt to slow the movement of the insects.
“We’ll check the exposed surfaces that a caterpillar can crawl into — under the license plates, under trailer hitches, under bumpers,” said Mr. Haskell.
While the gypsy moth is not native to America, it has been naturalized since its importation early in this century. “It’s now a part of our fauna. It’s not going to go away,” said Mr. Haskell. “Counties and states just can’t spend millions and millions of dollars going out in the woods and spraying bugs. But we want to get them down to the point where they are not as destructive,”
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