High Population Density and Egg Cannibalism Reduces the Efficiency of Mass-Rearing inEuscepes postfasciatus(Coleoptera: Curculionidae)

Abstract

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Development of insect life tables: comparison of two demographic methods of Delia antiqua (Diptera: Anthomyiidae) on different hosts

“…Population density significantly affects many aspects of insect activities, such as larvae growth 35 , adult fecundity 36 , egg mortality rate 37 , copulation 38 , and flight activity 39 , etc. As previously described above, the age-stage, two-sex life table has certain advantages for application in the study of insect population ecology compared to traditional life table 14–17, 40 .…”

Cannibalism of Brontocoris tabidus and Podisus nigrispinus during periods of pre-release without food or fed with Eucalyptus cloeziana plants

“…The increase of cannibalism on eggs and adults of B. tabidus and P. nigrispinus with the period without food shows that hunger stimulates the search for food (Bell 1990;Frazer and Gill 1981), explaining the fact that several arthropods prey on their conspecifics (Kuriwada et al 2009;Laycock et al 2006), a behavior considered a survival tactic (Michaud 2003) to overcome periods of food shortage (Laycock et al 2006). Periods of low availability of prey cause individuals to lose weight (Crum et al 1998;Lambert 2007), undergo changes in the life cycle (Lenski 1984;Molina-Rugama et al 1998b), invest in maintaining longevity by reducing the reproductive process (De Clercq and Degheele 1992;Lenski 1984;O'Neil and Wiedenmann 1990;Ramalho et al 2008), and lose some of their predatory ability (Pires 2009, unpublished data).…”

The neogregarine protozoan Farinocystis sp. reduces longevity and fecundity in the West Indian sweet potato weevil, Euscepes postfasciatus (Fairmaire)

“…Contact with contaminated feces from parental weevils is prevented by sterilization of collected weevil eggs using 70% ethanol and 5% formaldehyde (Ohno et al, 2008), and newly emerged weevils do not encounter diseased weevils. An artificial diet has also been developed for E. postfasciatus (Kuriwada et al, 2009;Shimoji and Kohama, 1996;Shimoji and Miyatake, 2002;Shimoji and Yamagishi, 2004;Urasaki et al, 2009). Significantly, weevils infected with Farinocystis sp.…”

“…Collected eggs were inoculated on the larval artificial diet. The procedures for mass-rearing E. postfasciatus on the artificial diet (e.g., larval diet content, adult diet content, egg collection and inoculation, larval rearing conditions) have been described in detail in previous studies (Kuriwada et al, 2009;Shimoji and Kohama, 1996;Shimoji and Yamagishi, 2004). Approximately 5 weeks after inoculating the eggs on the artificial larval diet, the artificial diet medium was dissected, and pupae were randomly extracted from the pupal chambers.…”