Modified Artificial Diet for Rearing of Tobacco Budworm,Helicoverpa armigera, using the Taguchi Method and Derringer's Desirability Function

Abstract

With the aim to improve the mass rearing feasibility of tobacco budworm, Helicoverpa armigera Hübner (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae), design of experimental methodology using Taguchi orthogonal array was applied. To do so, the effect of 16 ingredients of an artificial diet including bean, wheat germ powder, Nipagin, ascorbic acid, formaldehyde, oil, agar, distilled water, ascorbate, yeast, chloramphenicol, benomyl, penicillin, temperature, humidity, and container size on some biological characteristics of H. armigera was evaluated. The selected 16 factors were considered at two levels (32 experiments) in the experimental design. Among the selected factors, penicillin, container size, formaldehyde, chloramphenicol, wheat germ powder, and agar showed significant effect on the mass rearing performance. Derringer's desirability function was used for simultaneous optimization of mass rearing of tobacco budworm, H. armigera, on a modified artificial diet. Derived optimum operating conditions obtained by Derringer's desirability function and Taguchi methodology decreased larval period from 19 to 15.5 days (18.42 % improvement), decreased the pupal period from 12.29 to 11 days (10.49 % improvement), increased the longevity of adults from 14.51 to 21 days (44.72 % improvement), increased the number of eggs/female from 211.21 to 260, and increased egg hatchability from 54.2% to 72% (32.84 % improvement). The proposed method facilitated a systematic mathematical approach with a few well-defined experimental sets.

Morphological Characterization of Helicoverpa armigera (Hübner) (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae: Heliothinae)

“…Helicoverpa armigera larvae are considered polyphagous as they can feed on several different host plants, demonstrating high levels of nutritional adaptability. This study corroborates that no significant difference in eggs, larvae, pupae, or adults are observed in laboratory-reared individuals that were fed natural compared to artificial diets (Hardwick 1965;Fitt 1989;Hamed & Nadeem 2008;Ali et al 2009;Assemi et al 2012).…”

Atmospheric transformation of plant volatiles disrupts host plant finding

“…Thus far, there are only a few lines of indirect evidence for the potential biological effects of VOC degradation products, which stem from observations on a few normal constituents of the environment that are produced endogenously in plants, animals and humans. For instance, formaldehyde, a common degradation product of VOCs 5 , has been shown to reduce activity of herbivorous slugs when encapsulated in fertilizer pellets and released from soil 43 , but stimulate growth of moth larvae when added to artificial diet 44 . Methyl vinyl ketone, another common ozonolysis product of volatile terpenoids 5 45 , is cytotoxic and can induce plasma membrane damage and decreased viability of animal cells 46 .…”

Improving seed germination of the eggplant rootstock Solanum torvum by testing multiple factors using an orthogonal array design

“…An alternative commonly used in industrial applications are orthogonal (Taguchi) arrays (Roy, 2010), which allow the main effects of a large number of factors to be estimated with a limited number of treatments. Although orthogonal arrays have been successfully applied to address the problem of determining adequate combinations of factors in biological and biotechnological processes (Rao et al, 2008;Assemi et al, 2012;Sedghi et al, 2014;Vasilev et al, 2014), their use for establishing seed germination protocols has been highly limited (Wu et al, 2011;Poinapen et al, 2013) and largely overlooked.…”