Hi JC, Thank you for the fantastic email and hilarious photos. I really enjoyed them in spite of your understandable pain. 😅
I've had similar issues before with a Mexican book beetle - in my case, the reason was that even though they are highly mobile, they were infesting materials inside boxes so that they rarely "needed" to go out and about and they just infested whatever was inside the storage to full destruction level - so they didn't get caught very often on traps even though we knew they were probably there. We would find one or two here or there but nothing that would indicate infestation levels most of the time. I'm not clear on how your infested objects are being stored, but it could be that your moths are mostly hanging out inside the storage solution, which is a possibility for why you wouldn't have been catching them. I think adding pheromones to your traps if you hadn't already might help you draw them out and reveal infestations. Given that this has happened to you before, you might be familiar with specific areas in your storage where this seems to happen most often - so that even if you don't catch things on traps, you could try doing occasional look-ins into the areas that have been troublesome before. At my old job, we knew what particular shelving units tended to be problematic - which specific boxes and associated to which collections too. That helped us decide to just grab stuff and put it out for freezing depending on what area they were in. I remember a project at Harvard Peabody where they just sealed up whole shelving units with plastic to give themselves some time to react, plan and implement freezing and pheromone traps to reduce populations. They were very successful too and have had no recurrences as far as I'm aware. I think this must be published in 2021 Pest Odyssey proceedings. I will leave the how long question for the entomologists. Best, Angelica -- *Angélica Isa-Adaniya* | Conservator *Email* | a.isa14...@gmail.com <a.isa...@gmail.com> Sign up for my newsletter <https://conservallama.substack.com/> Feel free to connect with me on Website <http://angelicaisa.com/> | Linkedin <https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelicaisaadaniya/> | Twitter <https://twitter.com/ConservaLlama> | Instagram <https://www.instagram.com/a.isa140/> On Wed, 26 Apr 2023 at 13:00, JC Reardon <j...@saintonge.org> wrote: > *It seemed too good to be true. It's warming up, the humidity is way up: > moth prime time here in New England. **Yet not a sign of moths in the > most valuable wool storage area in the building, clean traps high and low. > Our isolation efforts must finally be paying off!* > > *I was actually excited, could I for once focus on actual repairs instead > of mitigation? A quarterly airing-out without caution tape and quarantine > zones?* > > *But wait, what's this suspicious lint drifting to the floor? That's > odd... hang on...* > > *<insert jarring horror movie music here>* > > > *SOOOO, how's everyone else's day going? Mine is going... actually, it's > not going at all, mine has just screeched to a halt.* > > Put bluntly, I'm not a happy camper in more ways than one. Not sure if I > want to scream, tear my hair out, burn the place down, or hide in the > janitor's closet with a bucket on my head. > > I suspect I've just learned a valuable lesson -don't trust the traps - the > hard way, and I'm hoping the damage is limited to my crushed spirit and > already overburdened workload, and that the collateral damage to textiles > is limited in extent. > > But now that my faith in the universe of IPM as I know it has been > shattered, I've got questions: > > *Question 1: What went wrong here?* What could be the reason behind > multiple empty traps adjacent to obviously active infestations? Fresh, > opened just over a month ago, placed both high and low, minimal light, > practically zero air flow, and one was literally a handspan away from the > red item pictured. > > *Question 2: What would you have done/do to avoid it happening again? * Where > do you draw the line when it comes to "trust but verify" and indicator > traps? How often does this sort of thing happen? > > *Question 3: How long has it been going on?* At what point should we > have caught this / was it just the traps that missed it? What size does a > population have to reach before traps will reliably indicate? What's the > worse case (for us) scenario/time-frame for reaching that point, under > ideal (for them) conditions? > > Apologies for the slew of questions; while I'd like to claim it's out of a > pursuit of understanding and a dedication to conservation, I will admit the > length of this email is directly related to just how much I don't want to > go deal with this. (Again.) > > Your time and any knowledge or wisdom you care to share will be greatly > appreciated! > > Best Regards, > > JC Reardon > > > *MWDs = Moths of Wool Destruction. > > > > > > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MuseumPests" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to pestlist+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pestlist/MN2PR16MB278319B77F57A4424ED83F02C5659%40MN2PR16MB2783.namprd16.prod.outlook.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pestlist/MN2PR16MB278319B77F57A4424ED83F02C5659%40MN2PR16MB2783.namprd16.prod.outlook.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MuseumPests" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to pestlist+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pestlist/CAAJvYjWMFCSFg6MaayzLEx2cFoBDtHfSgNZxf7ksgo5DbEA1Rg%40mail.gmail.com.
