Okeechobee landowner David Bockoras traveled to his local University of Florida Agricultural Extension office last month to pick up his free plastic container with about 40 small bright-red beetles.
“I’m a huge fan,” Bockoras said of the little insects. “Even if I have to buy ’em, I’m willing to.”
Bockoras was talking about air potato beetles bred at the nearby UF Indian River Research and Education Center exclusively to feed on an invasive vine from China. Since the early 20th century, the plant with shiny, green, heart-shaped leaves and brown tubers has crept and climbed over native trees in all of Florida’s 67 counties, smothering them by depriving them of sunlight. Bockoras’ three acres were infested with them.
Landowners and managers learned by experience that trying to destroy air potatoes using herbicides and excavation equipment was expensive and labor-intensive. So the U.S. and Florida departments of agriculture and the University of Florida began looking for a possible biological control agent, i.e. an organism that would eat only air potato vines and nothing else. After discovering the little red beetles on a trip to Asia in 2002, scientists bred the insects at three containment labs in Gainesville, Fort Pierce and Fort Lauderdale. They performed their first field release in 2009.
The air potato beetles happily chewed the leaves into Swiss cheese-like fragments, limiting the plants’ growth and reproduction without bothering native yam species that are related to it.
In 2014, St. Lucie County extension agent Ken Gioeli began distributing the bugs to interested landowners like Bockoras. Now the beetles are being deployed across the state, including in Brevard County.
“I’m gonna say they eradicate 70 to 80 percent of the vine itself,” Bockoras said.
Added Gioeli: “We are marketing this as a cure-all. The beetles don’t sting. They don’t bite people. They don’t eat other yam species. The insects just eat air potatoes. When the air potatoes disappear, so do the insects.”
Gioeli and other extension agents around the state, including Indian River County’s Christine Kelly-Begazo, give out the beetles between May and October when the air potatoes are actively growing. Interested landowners can sign up for free bugs by logging onto http://bcrcl.ifas.ufl.edu/airpotatofiles/airpotatoforms.shtml.
“We do have some problems, but not as severe as farther north,” Kelly-Begazo said of Indian River County’s air potato situation. “Twelve years ago, I started seeing it appear. … It became more of a problem the last couple of years. We are lucky to have caught it before it became too severe.”
Brevard County residents can also obtain beetles to battle their invasive air potato issues. For more information about the program, call the UF Extension Office in Brevard County at 321-633-1702 or they can email Sally Scalara directly at sasc@ufl.edu.
