Insects · Coleoptera · Curculionidae

Weevil

Anthonomus grandis

Not Evaluated

It has not yet been assessed against the IUCN criteria. See full glossary

The boll weevil is a beetle some six millimetres long that feeds on the buds and flowers of cotton. It is believed to be native to Central America, from where it migrated to the United States by way of Mexico in the late nineteenth century, and by the 1920s it had already infested every cotton-growing area in the United States, seriously affecting the industry and the people who worked in the American South. During the late twentieth century it became a major pest in South America. Since 1978, the Boll Weevil Eradication Program in the United States has allowed cotton growing to resume on its full scale across many areas.

Size

4 cm – 8 cm

Diet

Herbivore

Feeds mainly on plants.

Activity

Diurnal

Active mainly during the day.

Social structure

Solitary

Lives and hunts alone, joining others only to breed.

Sighting difficulty

Unknown

GrasslandHerbivore Diurnal Solitary Insect Grassland

18countries2same family

Fun facts

The town of Enterprise, Alabama, raised a monument in its honour in 1919: the pest forced farmers to diversify into peanuts and they fared far better than they had with cotton.
A decades-long eradication programme based on pheromone traps and coordinated treatments has removed it from almost all of the United States, one of the few cases of a pest eradicated at continental scale.
The adults overwinter hidden in the leaf litter at the field margins and reappear with the following crop.
It is the most destructive agricultural pest in the history of the United States. It entered from Mexico around 1892 through Brownsville, Texas, and in the five years following contact, cotton production would fall by around 50% in each affected area.
Its cumulative impact has been put at more than 16 billion dollars up to 2009, around 91 billion adjusted to current prices.
It changed the social history of the South: it ruined hundreds of landowners and pushed sharecroppers and labourers to leave for the north, in what is known as the Great Migration.
And it has a monument. In 1919 the townspeople of Enterprise, Alabama, put up a statue in its honour, thanking it for forcing them to abandon the cotton monoculture and switch to peanuts. It is the world's first monument dedicated to an agricultural pest.
The national eradication programme, begun in 1978, has eliminated it from almost the entire country; it holds out only in the lower Rio Grande valley, in Texas, and in northern Tamaulipas.
A single pair can leave two million descendants in one season.
Despite forty years of almost exclusive use of malathion in the eradication programme, it remains susceptible to that insecticide, something exceptional.