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Preventive Control

Natural enemies

Parasitoids

Tachinid fly

Predators

Spider

Monitoring

Look for cotton stainers from squaring onwards. Randomly select 14-day-old bolls to assess damage on the lint. The current proposed threshold for the pale cotton stainer is 3 bugs/m in beat sheet samples or 20% of young bolls are damaged for those older than 14 days (DEEDI).

Cultural and management practices

  1. Hand pick cotton stainers or they can be shaken out of the plant into a bucket of soapy water.
  2. Use baits to attract cotton stainers such as heap of cotton seeds or peeled sugarcane.
  3. Remove cotton plants and all its debris as soon as the cotton has been picked and once harvesting is over. Proper crop destruction of host plants is necessary because the cotton stainers' population depends only on few host plants.
  4. Clean storage area free of cotton seeds, where cotton stainers can live upon.
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