Ubaldo Torres noticed something strange when he visited his cotton herbicide drift research plots in summer 2022. Every row of young cotton plants sprayed with auxin herbicides, such as dicamba and 2,4-D, was covered in thousands of tiny crawling yellow and black specks.
Drift injury = susceptible to aphids
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Aphid infestations are shown on cotton plants in Texas A&M University research.
Aphids cluster underneath a cotton plant leaf.
Gyawali sprayed cotton plants with eight herbicides at three sublethal rates representing low, moderate and high herbicide drift exposure. Those rates ranged from a 0.01x dose to a 0.88x dose. Then he randomly arranged the sprayed plants in two circles inside the greenhouse, and placed an untreated, aphid-infested cotton plant in the middle of the circle.
Aphids in the greenhouse trial preferred different herbicides depending on the applied herbicide rate.
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