The Agricultural and Food Business 28022C Consortium represented by National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO) have established a new practical pest control system of fruit trees with more effective use of natural enemies of spider mites. This control system is called "wten(dabuten)"* control system and uses the appropriate combination of two natural enemy utilization techniques such as conservation of indigenous natural enemies, and release of commercialized natural enemies. NARO has published three Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) on NARO website to promote the popularization of this control system; the first SOP deals with explanations of the fundamentals, the second and third SOPs specialize in apple and pear production, respectively.
** The word "ten" is an abbreviation of "ten-teki" which means natural enemies in Japanese.
Overview
Spider mites, serious pests of fruit trees, reproduce so fast and easily develop resistance to chemically synthesized pesticides (acaricides). Hence, it has become a common practice to apply acaricides additionally to preserve the control effect in many production areas. Even though the new acaricide is the only reliance, there are concerns that the speed of novel acaricide development may not be up to the speed of resistance development in spider mites. In the future, "Transition to a practical pest management system that does not rely solely on acaricides" is desired for sustainable fruit tree production.
Therefore, we focused on Phytoseiidae mites, a major natural enemy group of spider mites and used combination of both "indigenous Phytoseiid mites that naturally inhabits orchards" and "commercialized Phytoseiid mites that are produced in factories ". We have established a new spider mite control system (wten(dabuten) control system) that greatly reduces the application on acaricides by making the best use of each advantage of these natural enemies and introduced the technology by the series of SOPs.
We created the SOPs of the wten(dabuten) control system for apples and Japanese pears together with the fundamental and references, as an instruction manual for installing the wten(dabuten) control system in the production site and published it on the following website of NARO. (Japanese only)
・https://www.naro.go.jp/publicity_report/publication/laboratory/naro/sop/142623.html
・https://www.naro.go.jp/publicity_report/publication/laboratory/naro/sop/142625.html
・https://www.naro.go.jp/publicity_report/publication/laboratory/naro/sop/142626.html
This series of SOPs focus on easy installation of the wten(dabuten) control system in production areas where it is difficult to control pest with acaricides. In addition, even in production areas where there is no problem with chemical control at present, we will promote the popularization of the wten(dabuten) control system since this control system contributes to both improving fruit tree productivity and the environmental conservation by reducing the application frequency and prolonging useful lives of acaricides.
For Inquiries
Contact: http://www.naro.go.jp/english/inquiry/index.html
