If the wasps’ services could be harnessed, it might be possible to reduce, or even dispense with, chemical insecticides
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskEphedrus cerasicola. Like many of their kin, these insects are parasitoids, a trophic status halfway between being parasites and predators. Instead of killing and then eating their prey, parasitoid wasps eat and thus kill them—or, rather, their larvae do.
Females inject their eggs into their victims—in this case rosy apple aphids—once they have mated. The larvae that hatch from them go on to devour their hosts’ organs before pupating and emerging as adults. If the wasps’ services could be harnessed, it might thus be possible to reduce, or even dispense with, chemical insecticides. That would save money.
Mobilising parasitoid wasps for pest control has a long history, beginning in the 1920s with their employment in greenhouses against whitefly. Unfortunately, attempts to useto control rosy apple aphids have so far failed. But Louise Ferrais and Thierry Hance of the Catholic University of Louvain, in Belgium, think they know why. Previous efforts, they reckons, have been so focused on the dietary requirements of the carnivorous larvae that they have neglected those of the nectar-loving adults.
To test this idea, they ran an experiment in an organic apple orchard. They divided it into six plots, each of 700 square metres. Three, they planted with strips of a mixture of 30 wildflower species. The other three they left flowerless, as controls. As winter ended, and aphid season drew nigh, they attached to each of nine trees per plot a tube containing about 1,250 wasp pupae from which adults were about to emerge—and repeated that between ten and 20 days later, to bolster the population.
The presence of flowers, they found, was associated with a reduction in the number of aphids in a plot by a third, compared with the controls. Though that is not as impressive as the 80-90% drop which would follow a pesticide blitz, it is a proof of principle, and might be improved by better management of the wasps and more understanding of their ecological needs.
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