The yellow striped oak worm, Anisota peigleri, has been an urban shade tree pest in the Gainesville, Florida area for the past five years. A. peigleri is present in the fall with caterpillars feeding on oaks from September through late October. A. peigleri is highly gregarious during the larval stage and in years of high populations it is considered a pest
This insect can become a pest on shade oak trees in the urban environment. When the caterpillars are in large populations they can defoliate entire oak trees. This leaves late instar caterpillars with out a food source. We have observed, in the field, late instar caterpillar dispersing from defoliated host trees to new host trees. Therefore, we wish to examine if a late instar caterpillar will prefer any of the common reported host trees in a binomial choice test using discs of host plant. We will test the null hypothesis that no preference exists and all discs have an equal chance of being chosen.
We found that caterpillars preferred shumard oak discs over water oak discs and live oak discs. Live oak discs were not preferred in any of the tests with only 7 of 90 live oak discs consumed first in all of the tests. All tests were analyzed using X2 goodness of fit test. All tests had probability values less than .001 (p<.001). We were able to reject our null hypothesis that the caterpillars would not prefer any of the discs. We found strong evidence (p<.001) that the caterpillars prefer shumard oak discs over water oak discs and live oak discs..
Species 1: Lepidoptera Saturniidae Anisota peigleri (yellowstriped oak worm, Peigler's oakworm)
Keywords: choice test, behavior
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