Evaluation of two non-destructive sampling methods for bean thrips (Thysanoptera: Thripidae) detection in navel oranges

Adult bean thrips, Caliothrips fasciatus (Pergande), over-wintering inside the navel of navel oranges in California are an export problem when detected in fruit sent to Australia. At present, a systems approach is used to reduce fruit infestation levels and one component of this approach is to search for thrips inside the navel by cutting 50 fruit per block prior to harvest and 75 fruit per grower lot before packing in the packinghouse with any detection of live bean thrips leading to that grower lot not being eligible for shipment to Australia. Given that bean thrips infestation levels are often 0.5% of the fruit or less, this amount of fruit cutting can lead to shipment of infested lots of citrus to Australia. As an alternative to cutting more fruit, two non-destructive methods of sampling for bean thrips inside the navel of navel oranges were investigated which might be used on larger numbers of fruit and result in fewer infested lots being shipped to Australia. A light trap at the apex of a pyramid-shaped black cloth tent caught 41.1% of adult bean thrips released at the bottom of the tent. When this experiment was repeated with the tent placed over a citrus bin two-thirds full of fruit, however, only 9.3% of thrips released at the bottom of the bin were captured. A second method of sampling, washing bean thrips out of the navel onto a screen, resulted in close to 90% recovery of thrips with each of the five spray rinses evaluated, including distilled water. Regression analysis indicated there was no statistical difference between results with the five rinses. Thus, it might be worthwhile trying to scale-up our laboratory method of rinsing with distilled water to a method that might be used in a commercial packinghouse for detection of bean thrips in large numbers of fruit. Even if one assumes that cutting fruit is 100% efficient in finding bean thrips inside the navel of navel oranges, sampling a much larger number of fruit using a method with 90% efficiency is shown to result in higher odds of finding any bean thrips that are present.