Boll weevil could be gone in a year

Noel Troxclair, an entomologist with the Texas AgriLife Research and Extension Center in Uvalde, said a string of circumstances, many of them weather-related, have combined to get the area much closer to being free of the pest.

It may not happen this year, unless everything comes together perfectly, said Troxclair. With more progress next year, boll weevil counts in south Texas could fall to a minimal level in 2011 and reach zero a year or two after that, he said.

Freezing temperatures in the area this winter, combined with the wet fall, killed cotton seed and mature plants that survived the last harvest. As a result, weevils will have less opportunity to reproduce and eat as they emerge this year. The harsh weather itself also will kill a large number of the weevils, Troxclair said.

He said the impact of the freeze won’t be known until weevil traps around fields are tabulated during the growing season later this year. While the pest is not likely to disappear this year, it could get to the point where it won’t recover, Troxclair said.

Boll weevils would have forced Jimmy Dodson out of the cotton-growing business south of Corpus Christi if agricultural officials had not developed effective controls over the last 15 years.

“We were spending lots of money and losing lots of cotton to weevils,” said Dodson, whose father and grandfather had farmed the area since the turn of the century.

Now those controls have virtually eliminated the weevil in much of north and west Texas and have substantially reduced the threat in south Texas.

Rainfall this fall and freezing temperatures this winter could provide the punch that knocks the legendary pest out of commission in an area where it first spread from Mexico during the early 1890s.