Pigs Root Out Evil Bugs

  • Apple grower Jim Koan has discovered that baby pigs are best for taking care of fallen wormy apples in his orchard. He says they have very tender noses. The adult pigs like to root around in the dirt and tend to tear up the orchard. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)

There are a lot of insects that love to eat
apples. A harmful insecticide that kills some of
those pests is being phased out. So farmers are
looking for other solutions. Rebecca Williams visits
an apple grower who’s counting on pigs to get some
help with his pest problem:

Transcript

There are a lot of insects that love to eat
apples. A harmful insecticide that kills some of
those pests is being phased out. So farmers are
looking for other solutions. Rebecca Williams visits
an apple grower who’s counting on pigs to get some
help with his pest problem:

(farm animal sounds – turkeys, etc)

The spring rains have started, and at Jim Koan’s pig pen that means mud.

(sound of shoes squishing in mud and piggy snorts)

Of course, these pigs don’t really seem to mind that.

“These Berkshires, you can see, are really friendly, they’re just coming
right up to you.”

Jim Koan really likes his pigs. That’s because he’s hoping the pigs will
take care of one of his worst pests. It’s a beetle called the plum
curculio. In early spring the beetles lay eggs in the little green apples.
The larvae hatch and eat the apples from the inside out.

Then the tree drops the bad wormy apples on the ground. And the worms just
keep on eating.

For a long time, farmers used an insecticide called azinphos-methyl to kill
the beetles. But the Environmental Protection Agency is phasing it out.
That’s because the EPA says the pesticide is very toxic to some wildlife and
it can make farm workers sick.

Jim Koan hasn’t used the pesticide for 10 years, ever since he became an
organic grower. So for years now he’s been trying to find a perfect
predator to stop the beetle larvae.

The chickens were too lazy. Hawks ate the guinea fowl that he tried.

So, finally, Koan says he had a flashback. His grandpa used to have hogs in
the orchard.

“When I would climb up to go up in the tree in the summertime to get a green
apple to eat all the hogs would come running over there and my granddad
always told me you stay away from those hogs they’ll eat you up! I’d be
really scared and be up there for an hour or two until the hogs left again.”

(laughs)

Koan says he knows now that the hogs were just hoping for a snack. So last
year he decided to buy some hogs and see if they would eat the wormy apples
on the ground. He says baby pigs worked best.

“And they’d just go up one row gleaning it, kinda like little vacuum
cleaners (makes sucking sound) and suck up all the apples!”

Koan says the baby pigs ate 98% of the fallen apples with beetle
larvae in them. But he still needed to know that the beetles were actually
gone, so they wouldn’t come back to attack his apples next year.

That job
was up to researchers at Michigan State University. Koan says they fed a
mix of beetle larvae and apples to pigs on campus.

“Then they put diapers on the hogs – truly, diapers!! It was unbelievable.
They took special superglue and velcroed it on their butt so then when they
defecated they caught all that. Then they took these poor students and made
them go through there and wash all that and look for worms.”

Koan says out of 200 worms that were fed to the pigs, they only found one
worm at the other end. That means, so far it looks like pigs are a
pretty good predator.

But the researchers don’t want to let pigs run wild – just yet. David
Epstein is the lead researcher on the project.

“Jim and I are scheming all the time. I have great expectations that this
could be a good management tool in the future but we have to figure out how
to do it properly.”

Epstein says they need to make sure the pigs don’t cause any contamination
problems. Something like E. coli. He says so far there isn’t any
evidence of that, but it’s the kind of thing you have to be sure about.

If this all goes well, the farmer and the scientist will be writing a book
together. It’ll be sort of a self-help book: getting pigs to take care of
what’s bugging you.

For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Safer Wiggly Worms

People who go fishing might be attracted to a new environmentally friendly lure. Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Transcript

People who go fishing might be attracted to a new environmentally friendly lure. Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Soft plastic lures such as wiggly worms are often made more flexible by adding chemical compounds called phthalates. These chemicals have been linked to adverse health effects… and when the lures are torn off a hook, the compounds pollute waters.


Tim Osswald is a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin. He’s helped a manufacturer come up with a process that uses tiny plastic fibers inside the lures. Osswald says the microfibers make the lures stronger.


“Using this technology they would no longer end up at the bottom of the lake. Or at least at a much, much smaller rate.”


Oswald says the lures no longer stretch like a piece of rubber but still turn and wiggle and have that ‘worm-like feel.’ He says the reinforced lure might cost a little more in the stores. But he says they’re likely to last longer.


For the Environment Report, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

Related Links

Gardeners Bats for Guano

A dealer in plant fertilizers is getting top dollar for product that he gathers close to home. Fred Kight reports some gardeners are just bats for the nutrient:

Transcript

A dealer in plant fertilizers is getting top dollar for product that he gathers close to home. Fred
Kight reports some gardeners are just bats for the nutrient:


What sells for 14 dollars a pound, comes from church steeples and is a fantastic plant fertilizer?
It’s bat poop. Or, more properly, bat guano.


Matt Peters says he already was selling worm dung as a plant food.


When nearby church leaders called him about their bat dropping problems, he added the guano to
the fertilizer inventory of his Ohio business. Peters says some customers are attracted by the
novelty… while others just want healthy plants:


“Definitely in my own personal trials I’ve been amazed at the power of bat guano. I never knew
green could be so green.”


Peters says the original manufacturers, so to speak, of his guano eat mosquitoes.


Since mosquitoes are nitrogen-rich, so is the bat guano… and plants love nitrogen.


For the Environment Report, I’m Fred Kight.

Related Links

Study: Anglers to Blame for Earthworm Invasion

Earthworms invading forests throughout the region are probably being introduced by anglers. That’s the conclusion of a new study. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports:

Transcript

Earthworms invading forests around the Great Lakes are probably
being introduced by anglers. That’s the conclusion of a new
study. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill
reports:


Earthworms are good for gardens. But in forests they eat up the
thick layer of leaves on the forest floor.


Lee Frehlich is with the University of Minnesota. He supervised
the study.

“Many of the tree seedlings and the wildflowers that live in the
forest are actually rooted in all of this leaf material. So when
the worms eat that, their rooting material is literally eaten out
from under them, so a lot of them die.”

The study found in some areas infested with worms, there were
half as many young sugar maples as in worm-free areas. Birds
that use leaves for nests on the ground could also decline.

Frelich says anglers should bring any unused earthworms back home
with them, rather than dumping them in the lake.

For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

Earthworms Alter Forest Ecology

Most of us think of earthworms as beneficial creatures. Gardeners are always happy to spot a worm in the flowerbed because they add fertilizer to the soil. Many anglers say they’re the best thing for catching fish. But scientists are beginning to learn worms aren’t so friendly to Great Lakes forests. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports:

Transcript

Most of us think of earthworms as beneficial creatures. Gardeners are always happy to spot a
worm in the flowerbed because they add fertilizer to the soil. And many anglers say they’re the
best thing for catching fish. But scientists are beginning to learn worms aren’t so friendly to
Great Lakes forests. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports.


(fade up Girl Scouts)


This Girl Scout troop is learning about worms. Judy Gibbs is a naturalist at the Hartley Nature
Center in Duluth. She shows the girls how to coax worms out of the soil. They pour water laced
with powdered mustard into the worms’ burrows.


It irritates the worms and they come squiggling up by the hundreds.


“Pour it in. Wait a minute. Here it comes. It doesn’t like the mustard and it comes right up.
Look at this one (laughter). oh, there’s another one. Look at it go!” (shrieks)


On their walk through the woods, the girls look for dead leaves. There aren’t many. Judy Gibbs
explains why.


“Here’s a leaf stem that’s being pulled into this hole. Who’s doing this? Ants! No. Worms.
There’s big night crawlers. You know what a night crawler is? They grow straight down into the
ground, and they come up at night and pull leaves down into their burrows. And they eat the leaf
right off. That’s why we’re not finding any leaves.”


Worms eating leaves might seem natural, but it turns out these worms aren’t native to these
woods. The last glacier buried most of what is now the Great Lakes region. When it melted,
plants and animals returned to create a community of maples, pines, songbirds, and tender plants
growing on the forest floor, like trillium…but not earthworms.


Cindy Hale is a biologist who studies the native wildflowers that grow in northern hardwood
forests. She loves the spring bloomers that take root in the spongy layer of decaying leaves on
the forest floor. Trillium, bloodroot, solomon’s seal.


Hale says many of these plants are disappearing.


“Sites that forty years ago were carpets of trillium have been slowly over the last two decades
declining to almost nothing, and people were scratching their heads, trying to figure out just
what’s going on.”


Earthworm populations are thickest close to cities. But Hale says people bring worms with them
when they come to the woods.


At first, settlers carried them in, along with the animals and plants they brought from Europe or
the east coast. These days, worms are spread by people who drive in the woods – loggers, ATV
riders…


“But in particular, fishing bait is a huge way that worms get moved around in our region.
Because there’s so many lakes and so much fishing.”


Hale and her colleagues set up test plots along an advancing line of worms in the Chippewa
National Forest in central Minnesota. The worms crawl about three yards further into the forest
each year. Hale is studying how the soil and the plants have changed as the worms advance.


Worms eat the decaying leaves on the forest floor. They mix that organic matter into the mineral
soil beneath it. And in time, they can use up all the organic matter and leave only mineral soil
behind.


That means the plants that have evolved to take root in the leaves on top of the soil have lost their
home.


Hale says these changes could affect every plant and animal that lives in the woods. She says,
for instance, even birds have declined by nearly 50% in the last fourteen years.


“Because ovenbirds nest in that forest floor, so if you lose the forest floor, then you may well
affect ground-nesting birds such as that. So when you start thinking about it, the potential
ramifications across the ecosystem get really wild.”


Hale says one of the big challenges in studying this problem is that there’s been very little basic
research – like how many worms are there are and where.


To gather more information and to get more people involved, Hale created a web-based learning
program. She’s asking teachers from around the country to have their classes do worm counts
and other research. Hale plans to add their data to the web page.


In Minnesota, the Department of Natural Resources is working with interest groups to try to slow
the spread of worms. Next year’s fishing regulations will include instructions not to dump your
worms at the end of a day of fishing.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Stephanie Hemphill in Duluth.

Hunt for Slug-Eating Nematodes

A $5,000 reward is being offered to anyone who finds a tiny, parasitic worm in the U.S. that kills leaf-eating slugs. The gray garden slug is notorious for destroying crops and ornamental plants in the Midwest. Researchers at Ohio State University have been looking for the worm that eats the slugs. So far, they’ve examined thousands of slugs sent to them in the mail … but they haven’t been able to find the worm. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Natalie Walston reports:

Transcript

A five thousand dollar reward is being offered to anyone who finds a tiny, parasitic worm in the United States that kills leaf-eating slugs. The gray garden slug is notorious for destroying crops and ornamental plants in the Midwest. Researchers at Ohio State University have been looking for the worm that eats the slugs. So far, they’ve examined thousands of slugs sent to them in the mail, but they haven’t been able to find the worm. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Natalie Walston reports.


(Natural sound of guinea hens)


The Kingwood Center in Mansfield, Ohio is made up of 50 acres of well-tended English gardens. Paved trails lead through rows of perennials and peonies, around fountains and a duck pond. Hundreds of hostas grow beneath shade trees, but the plants leaves have holes chewed through them. John Makely is Kingwood’s head gardener. He says the conventional methods to kill the slugs eating his hostas are out of the question here.


“The problem that we have here with slug bait is that we do have birds roaming around, peacocks and guinea hens that roam around freely. They sort of grouse, browse I should say, the grounds and we would be afraid that they would pick up some of those pellets and poison them.”


Slug bait consists of a poison that can harm more than its intended target. But right now, it’s the only commercial method available to control slugs. So, now there’s a big push by large, commercial nurseries to find a chemical-free way to kill the gray garden slugs that eat ornamental plants. Ohio State University researcher, Pavinder Grewal says there’s a major economic reason to find a good control method.


“Last year we had a lot of rain here when the corn was emerging. And there have been several fields in Ohio that were totally wiped out by the slugs. Basically zero corn production in some fields.”


Grewal has found a natural slug killer. It’s a tiny parasitic worm, known as a nematode. It is native to England and parts of several countries in South America. Farmers and gardeners in those countries buy them in bulk in powder form and sprinkle the worms on their fields. Scientists think the worm will work in this country as well. But if the worm is imported, it must first undergo years of testing to make sure it will not harm native plants and animals.


“We don’t see any problem because some of the tests that we have performed with the nematode…we find it to be pretty safe to non-target organisms. And, we find that this nematode does not infect all slugs.”


To prove this to the federal government could be difficult. Grewal is looking for the worm, in the United States he took out an ad in various publications. He studies more than twenty thousand slugs, but has yet to find the worm he’s looking for. Now he’s sending people off to remote areas of the country to find it. He hopes to be successful because it could take years of testing before the worms can be brought into this country. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Natalie Walston.