Biological Control of Agricultural Insect Pests

Abstract

Pests are highly responsible for heavy crop losses and reduced food supplies, poorer quality of agricultural products, economic hardship for growers and processor. Generally, chemical control methods are practiced for their control which is neither always economical nor effective and may have associated unwanted health, safety and environmental risks. However, to meet the challenge of feeding to the ever increasing human population, an efficient, economical and environment friendly disease control methods are requisites. In this regard, biological control may be an effective means of reducing or mitigating the pests and pest effects through the use of natural enemies. Biological control is an environmentally sound which involves the use of beneficial microorganism to control plant pathogens and diseases they cause. Therefore, in this chapter we will provide a comprehensive account of this environmental friendly approach for effectively management of plant diseases. This chapter will also accentuate the development of biological control agents for practical applications and the underlying mechanism. The contents in the chapter will be beneficial and advantageous to all those working in academia or industry related to crop protection.

Ecotoxicological effects of a glyphosate-based herbicide on Gryllus (Gryllus) assimilis (Orthoptera: Gryllidae) ontogeny: A study on antioxidant system, oxidative stress and cholinergic system

“…; Grzywacz et al, 2014). When it is not possible to avoid pollution from GBHs, remediation techniques need to be employed, including the use of residual by products from industry and agriculture for the production of chemical adsorbents (Jiang et al 2018), bioremediation (Masotti et al 2021), phytoremediation (Priyadharshini et al 2021), and biotechnologies for pesticide removal (Espinoza-Montero et al 2020).To mitigate the damage caused by pest insects like Gryllus in various crops, additional protective measures can be implemented, such as the use of biological control methods involving natural predators, parasitoids, nematodes, bacteria, fungi, and viruses(Kumari et al 2022), monitoring of pest populations followed by predictions of damage intensity (Speight 2016), management of pest insect habitats(Akter et al 2019), and physical control methods(Thakur et al 2021). The unregulated application of GBH combined with intensi ed environmental impacts reduces the longevity of non-target insects and generates responses that are still poorly understood, which can cause chronic detrimental effects to the environment(Druille et al 2016;Gill et al 2017;Van Bruggen et al 2018).…”