Significant progress has been made in the three-year scale project led and jointly funded by the South Australian Research and Development Institute (SARDI) and Wine Australia, in collaboration with the University of Adelaide, the Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI) and the Australian National University (ANU).
The project, which will play a critical role in developing more effective and sustainable control strategies for scale insects, has called on vineyard owners and managers from around Australia to collect samples of scale from their blocks.
“To date, over 40 collection kits have been distributed to 20 volunteer vineyard and monitoring sites in New South Wales and South Australia, resulting in the collection of 2919 scale insects,” said lead researcher David Logan, an entomologist and Senior Research Fellow in Pest Management, funded jointly by the University of Adelaide and SARDI. “Of these, 1588 have been sent to the AWRI for DNA sequencing, while 1062 are being stored for morphological identification training.”
Monitoring sites have been established in four key South Australian wine regions: Riverland, McLaren Vale, Langhorne Creek and Adelaide Hills.
Early data on crawler activity and life cycles indicate significant variation in hatch timing. Preliminary results show emergence mostly occurs after the EL19 insecticide application cut-off and again in January.
David Logan, from the University of Adelaide, said further sequencing and morphological analysis will clarify whether scale insects in these regions have two generations per year — challenging previous assumptions — or if distinct species are emerging at different times.