In addition, in many cases, the benefits of using natural enemies accrue at no additional cost. Biological control can be less or more expensive than pesticides. You can incur significant expenses studying, choosing, testing and breeding a bioagent. However, in cases where bioagents are applied to low-level pest populations, pest control can be long-term and economical.
Some fungi attack insects and kill them. A fungal spore penetrates the insect and grows all over it. It takes about a week for the insect to die. Fungi are cost-effective, unless a high application rate is needed for severe insect infestations.
Biocontrol, short for biological control, is the management of a pest, typically an invasive species, by introducing a natural predator into the environment. Biocontrol reduces the pest population and its impacts on the environment. Natural enemies are an environmentally friendly alternative to pesticides that are often used to control invasive species. Biocontrol is sustainable and long-term; the biggest cost to control an introduced species is research involved in determining the safety and efficacy of a biocontrol agent.
Therefore, biocontrol can be cost-effective in the long term. The Biological Insect Control Laboratory at the University of Rhode Island has many ongoing biocontrol projects targeting invasive species in Rhode Island to help reduce the ecological and social impact of a pest. Biological control is not new, it is simply appreciated recently. This renewed appreciation is due to the widespread insecticidal treadmill, which is largely a product of the alteration of the balance of insect communities by insecticides.
Biological control is a natural phenomenon; regulation of the number of plants and animals by natural enemies. In this broad sense, biological control is vital to public health because it prevents the myriad species of insects from outperforming us in competition. It also has direct public health advantages, since when natural enemies are manipulated to control diseases, insect vectors. The insecticide disturbance of biological insecticide control and the resulting pesticide treadmill have serious public health implications.
One is the increased burden of pesticides in the environment. The other is the acceleration of pesticide resistance in insect vectors of diseases. The treadmill and its associated hazards will not diminish as long as chemical control dominates our pest control strategy. In nature, populations of organisms suffer frequent attacks and high mortality rates from predators, parasites, parasitoids and diseases, collectively referred to as “natural enemies”.
Biological control tactics use enemies or natural agents (some professionals call them “beneficial”) to control pests. The ultimate goal of biological control is to suppress pest population and damage without pesticides or with reduced pesticide use. Natural enemies are used differently depending on the target pest, host, environmental conditions, and pest life cycle. There are three general approaches to biological control.
The requirements of an ERA for non-native biological control agents have been recently addressed by Bigler et al. This allows researchers to identify key biological characteristics of the organism, such as host range and climatic requirements, that determine the ability of species to establish themselves in new environments. Prior to the large-scale application of chemical pesticides, biological control was one of the main methods of pest control integrated into a “systems approach” to pest prevention and reduction, encompassing animals, weeds and pathogens. An analysis of 51 recent studies on habitat manipulation to improve biological control of conservation (Gurr et al.
The regulatory process can be very costly and, therefore, can prevent small and medium-sized companies from developing biological control products. When selective natural enemies are used in biological control programs, there are no harmful side effects, but with highly polyphagous species there may be some negative environmental effects (van Lenteren et al. Biological control is an attempt to introduce the plant's natural enemies to its new habitat, with the assumption that these natural enemies will eliminate the plant's competitive advantage until its vigor is reduced to a level comparable to that of natural vegetation. Unlike pesticides, biological control agents generally lack the potential to adversely affect human and animal health.
The first major successes in biological control occurred with exotic pests controlled by natural enemy species collected from the country or area of origin of the pest (classic control). These newly imported pests have threatened biological control of existing pests because governments generally respond to pest invasions by initiating extermination programs based on the frequent application of pesticides, thus killing the natural enemies of “old” pests. Other conservation biological control practices seek to minimize the impacts of habitat manipulation or agricultural practices on natural enemies. Potential biological control agents are found by examining weeds in their area of origin abroad and looking for damage caused by natural enemies of weeds.
Biological control has been described as “unreliable” compared to pesticides, but once again, the information for this point of view is ambiguous. In flood releases, biological control agents are released in large quantities to rapidly overwhelm the pest population without the expectation of spreading the population of biological control agents or continuing suppression of the pest population. Interestingly, an analysis of published and unpublished information found that only 1.5% of entomophage biological control agents introduced prior to 1999 had undergone any pre-release host specificity test (Lynch et al. .
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