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Department of Agriculture approves a foreign insect for release to control a pest plant, its host preferences are methodically tested under tight quarantine conditions. Today, biological-control experts enlist only those insects that attack an extremely narrow range of enemies, ideally a single invasive species. It was common before 1950 (and not uncommon into the 1980s) to look for pest-fighters with broad appetites. “It led people to think they could use biocontrol agents as a cure-all,” she says, “when in fact they just got really, really lucky.”
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In decimating the citrus pest and keeping it in check ever since, without collateral damage or becoming a pest itself, the beetle has performed superbly-possibly a little too superbly, suggests Erin Stephens, a Cornell University insect ecologist. An Australian ladybug, the vedalia beetle (Rodolia cardinalis), was released in California citrus orchards in 1888 to combat cottony cushion scale. deployment of a biocontrol insect occurred more than a century ago. “With a biological organism that reproduces, once it’s out there, it’s out there. “With a chemical spill, you could theoretically recover all the molecules,” says entomologist May Berenbaum of the University of Illinois. Whereas a chemical pesticide weakens over time, living creatures have a way of multiplying. (The organisms used for biocontrol include not only insects but also other arthropods, viruses, fungi, bacteria, nematodes and other life-forms.) And when good bugs go bad, they can make big trouble. When it works, biological control is more benign, more efficient, and more precisely targeted than the usual method of controlling pest species, which is spraying their general whereabouts with toxic chemicals.īut just as an exotic plant can turn invasive when freed from the enemies that kept it in check back home, so too can an exotic biocontrol insect run amuck itself in the absence of the predators and competitors it evolved with. In the field of classical biological control-the use of exotic natural enemies to counter invasive pests-examples of biocontrol insects that have themselves gone out of control are relatively few. Possibly due to this onslaught, even New York’s official state insect, the nine-spotted lady beetle (Coccinella novemnotata), is now extinct in the state. To make matters worse, the newcomers are apt to eat the hometown ladybugs, too. Along with another foreign import, the seven-spotted ladybug (Coccinella septempunctata) brought over earlier from Europe, the ravenous Asian insect has eaten so many aphids so fast that many native ladybugs may have been left with too little to eat. Swarms of the little beetles eventually marched up the Atlantic seaboard into New England and westward across the Mississippi. Unfortunately, it also revealed two unwelcome traits: the wanderlust of a hobo and the appetite of a gourmand. The multicolored Asian lady beetle (Harmonia axyridis) did a superb job. WHEN A PLAGUE of tree-climbing aphids afflicted pecan orchards in the southeastern United States in the 1970s, federal biologists released a tree-climbing ladybug from Asia to devour them. So, the correct answer is 'Both Assertion and Reason are correct but Reason is not the correct explanation for Assertion'.Introduced into this country to control pests, these insects now wreak havoc of their own.These viruses are excellent species-specific, biocontrol agents and have narrow spectrum insecticidal application. The majority of baculoviruses used as biological control agents are in the genus Nucleopolyhedrovirus. Baculoviruses are pathogens that attack insects and other arthropods.It has been used successfully against pathogenic fungi belonging to various genera, viz. Trichoderma is a potent biocontrol agent and used extensively for soil born diseases.It relies on predation, parasitism, herbivory, or other natural mechanisms, but typically also involves an active human management role. The organism which is used for biocontrol is called as biocontrol agents. Biological control or biocontrol is a method of controlling pests such as insects, mites, weeds and plant diseases using other organisms.