We were hard pressed to find any psyllids alive! Really. Aphidoletes aphidimyza larvae were easy to see, and, a lot of little brown “cigar” shaped things. The newly emerged, adult psyllid is a light brown, in colour, before it darkens to black with a white stripe on the abdomen. This newly emerged adult seemed to be a very vulnerable stage for the A. aphidimyza attack. The other stage(s) that were obviously being attacked were the early larval stages, which are like big whitefly scale with legs.

The trial was 1 acre in size, tomatoes overplanting the defeated peppers, so evenly mixed. The psyllids actually appeared to prefer the tomatoes, although they had a “field day” on the peppers, before the tomatoes showed up. We released 48,000 A. aphidimyza weekly, about 1 per square foot. Our observations were 3 weeks after the first release, just prior to the 3rd release.

It was obvious that we had overshot the target. We had saved the plants, which are no longer being pulled and are now producing again.

A second house has now been given to us, for another, more realistic trial. It is a 10 acre tomato house with a moderate psyllid problem, evenly distributed, and currently being held in check by weekly Neem sprays. We will be applying 96,000 A. aphidimyza per week to the entire house, so a rate of about 1/5 that used in the previous trial, or 0.2 per square foot (about 2 per square meter). We will be inspecting it next week. — Brian Spencer

There may be more.