Response of Sucking Insect Pest Fauna Towards Bt and Non Bt Cotton Genotypes under Varying Climatic Condition

Abstract

A bout 18 %, agriculture contributes in Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Cotton has 0.8 % share in the economy and 4.5% in the agriculture values of Pakistan. Cotton is an important crop that's why it is believed as the lifeline of the Pakistan (Anonymous, 2018). Cotton is the world's most important fibrous crop and it grows in both tropical and sub-tropical areas of universe (Bala et al., 2019). Throughout the year of 2018 and 2019, the cotton production keeps on at 9.861 million bales. Sometime the production of the crop was also affected by meteorological factors. The production of the cotton crop in 2019 remained at the 2373 Ha while the yield was 606 Kgs/Ha. Textile is the major sector of the Pakistan. The exports of the cotton and cotton textile during 2019 from July-March remained at 9771 US Million dollars (Anonymous, 2018). Pakistan is at 4 th after US, China and India in case of cotton production (Anonymous, 2018). In between sucking pests of cotton; whitefly, jassid, thrip, recorded as greatest damaging pests (Arif et al., 2006;Ali and Aheer, 2007;Salman et al., 2011). Lint quality and Abstract | The experiment was conducted at Faisalabad in the trail region of UAF during 2018 to understand response of sucking insect pest fauna against the transgenic and non-transgenic cotton varieties. To figure out the response of these pest with the meteorological factors against whitefly, thrips and jassid. For this experiment RCBD Design was used. The five varieties of cotton were used in which IUB-2015, MNH-886, FH-142 and CEMB-33 were the Bt varieties while FH 942 was the non-Bt. The highest population of whitefly (4.707/leaf ), thrips (4.073/leaf ) and jassid (3.940/leaf ) was found in July on MNH-886, CEMB-33 and FH-942 respectively. Extreme in addition least temperature had positive outcome on pests including whitefly, thrips and jassid culture. In case of thrips, whitefly and jassid rainfall, relative humidity and sunlight exposure had negative effects.The moisture having negative response with the whitefly and intermediate with the thrips population while with the jassid it exhibited positive correlation. Sucking pests also had an influence on the yield factor.