December 1998, Volume 19 No. 4
- General News
- Biorational
- Training News
- Internet Round-Up
- Announcements
- New Books
- Conference Reports
- Proceedings
By: Tony Little, Technical Support Group to the Global IPM Facility, CABI Bioscience.
This quarter, Round-up focuses on the conservation of natural enemies.
I have always been slightly wary of conducting `broad spectrum' literature searches on the net, ever since a search on IPM in spice crops threw up `Mama Paprika's Red Hot Web Page' (I forget the address now). Further investigation secured me an almost instantaneous interview with the IT manager and a lecture on appropriate use of company technology!
So it was with some trepidation that I tapped `conservation' into the search engine, asking it to search within the results of two previous requests `biological control' and `natural enemies'. This yielded a few useful looking sites, but the majority were at some variance to the subject.
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/8180.html, the University of California Press site, was among the more relevant pages. It carries useful reviews of recent publications, one of which, `Enhancing Biological Control' edited by Charles Pickett and Robert Bugg, focuses on the role of conservation of natural enemies in biological control.
Staying with the University of California, UC Davis post their forthcoming activities, including a course on conservation and augmentation in biological control, at http://ucdnema.ucdavis.edu/imagemap/nemmap/ENT135/12aCons.htm
http://www.rain.org/~sals/cotton.html, linked to the RAIN (Regional Alliance for Information Networking) site, was the only other page of real interest and carries an informative article about biological control in cotton, within which there is a good discussion on conservation in cotton systems.
It seems, then, that the bulk of information on conservation of natural enemies is to found at sites with a somewhat broader subject matter, and here I turn to my `Blue Chip' sites.
http://ipmwww.ncsu.edu/biocontrol/2a.htm/#2, a site within the Biological Control Virtual Information Center includes a chart listing commercially available natural enemies and pesticides that are compatible with them. While this is aimed at augmentative releases, it contains pesticide effect data for some important generalized predator groups such as lacewings and ladybirds which may be applicable to field use.
http://www.igc.org/panna/pestis.html carries the Pesticide Information Service (PESTIS). PESTIS is an on-line database that contains pesticide reform-related material, including articles, newsletters, reports and action alerts. While I could find no articles relating directly to conservation of natural enemies using the site search engine, there were a number of articles, such as `Benefiting from Bugs' by Dan Imhoff, that contained a discussion on the topic.
http://www.wisc.edu/entomology/mbcn/fea201.html, which is home to the on-line journal `Mid-west Biological Control News' proved to be the most useful site. Of particular interest was an article entitled `Conservation of Natural Enemies: Keeping Your Livestock Happy', but which, rest assured, is entirely entomological, and is a nice introduction to conservation as a biocontrol strategy, with a useful list of references and contacts.
So a piecemeal and somehow rather unsatisfying search this quarter, but what it does do is highlight the lack of easy to locate, informative sites on this crucial, but evidently neglected aspect of biological control systems.