Three Texas Counties Met the Cotton Jassid for the First Time This August

The two-spotted cotton leafhopper spent 2025 announcing itself across the Southeast. This year it quietly added three Texas counties to the map, and nobody saw it until August.

Grimes and Burleson counties, both in the Brazos Bottom, recorded their first cotton jassid finds this season, along with Willacy County at the far southern tip of the Rio Grande Valley. All three first sightings landed in August, according to Cotton Grower's season wrap published Oct. 16. Texas had jassid pressure in 2025, but these are new addresses for an insect that has been moving west since it reached the mainland.

Ken Lege, the cotton specialist with Texas A&M AgriLife Extension, is not treating the late timing as bad news. "If you have to find it at all, it's better to find it later in the season," he said. Early research suggests "it will do less damage the later you find it" — a small mercy in a crop where the insect's damage routinely shows up before the insect does.

Oklahoma found it in nurseries, not fields

The northern edge of the story is odder. The Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry confirmed the leafhopper in August at two central Oklahoma nurseries. It has not been detected in Oklahoma cotton at all. A pest that turns up in the ornamental trade before it turns up in the field is a reminder that this insect's host list runs well past cotton — okra, eggplant and hibiscus are all on it, and the Stop 2SCL project notes the ornamental and vegetable sectors are exposed alongside a cotton crop valued in the billions.

That brings the count to ten states reporting the pest this production season. Two summers is all it took to get from the Caribbean into Florida, up through Georgia and the Southeast, west across the Mid-South and into Oklahoma and Texas.

A tracking map replaces the rumor mill

Spread of that speed tends to outrun the paperwork, which is the gap a new University Extension website is trying to close. Stop2scl.org, run under Clemson University entomologist Zee Ahmed with dozens of Extension researchers listed as collaborators, publishes real-time distribution and detection updates, diagnostic tools and standardized sampling protocols.

"Ultimately, this website will provide real-time diagnostics, distribution updates, management guidance, and research-based tools developed through coordinated efforts among universities, federal agencies, and industry partners," the site reads. For a county agent in the Brazos Bottom trying to work out whether a yellowing block is jassid or something else, a shared map beats a phone tree.

What scouting looks like now

Oklahoma State Extension's guidance, issued by Ashleigh Faris, Maxwell Smith and Jenny Dudak, is the most concrete advice circulating: work the mid-to-upper canopy, focus on the fourth mainstem leaf below the terminal where nymphs congregate, and count nymphs rather than adults because adults fly. Twenty-five leaves per field is the minimum sample. Keep scouting until at least two weeks before defoliation — green leaves are what fills bolls, and once they are gone the yield conversation is over.

The treatment threshold Extension entomologists have held to remains one insect per leaf.

For 2027, the early recommendations are unglamorous and mostly agronomic. Planting early has shown value in outrunning the peak pressure windows of migratory populations. Heavy nitrogen applications tend to pull more jassids in. Adequate potassium matters because deficient plants take more damage.

The insect itself is small enough that finding it is the hard part: roughly 15 to 34 eggs laid inside leaf tissue on the underside, five to nine days to hatch, then five instars across five to 21 days before it can fly. Amrasca biguttula is native to the Indian subcontinent and arrived in the Southeast only recently, which is why every county record still gets written down.

For Texas growers, the season's ledger reads like this — three new counties, all discovered late, none of them a surprise in the way 2025 was. The pest is no longer arriving. It is filling in the map.