Detecting and sampling the pest for pest management, either through enumerating their life stages or by quantifying the crop damage in a cropping system, is one of the cornerstones of deploying integrated pest management. The presence of adult spotted-wing drosophila (SWD) in a small fruit cropping system can be detected through monitoring traps. However, these traps are less valuable in accurately predicting the SWD larval fruit infestation levels as the trap catches poorly correlate with the larval fruit infestation levels. The current SWD larval extraction and quantification methods from the fruit samples include immersing the fruits in hot water, salt, or sugar solution. We introduce a novel, fast and effective larval extraction method by subjecting the fruit samples to vacuum pressure. We optimized the vacuum pressure and duration for larval extraction in blueberries by testing vacuum pressure ranging from -33.9 to -99.9 kPa for 5 to 60 minutes. Additionally, we compared the larval recovery rate and sampling cost of the optimized vacuum extraction method with the sugar and salt extraction methods. The results from our study suggest that the vacuum sampling method is a promising sampling technique for detecting SWD larval fruit infestation in small fruit crops.
