Diet Could Trim Crop Pest Populations

May 17, 2000

A patent is being sought by USDA scientists on a new insect diet that will make plant bugs and other crop pests unwitting accomplices to their own destruction. However, the key is finding a replacement for the plants on which the bugs now feed.

Without special diets, rearing of the insects becomes cost prohibitive, according to USDA’s Agricultural Research Service. The new diet consists of cooked chicken eggs, lima bean meal, wheat germ, soy flour, yeast, sugar, vitamins and preservatives. The diet enables researchers to propagate destructive plant bugs as hosts for the production of parasitoids that may eventually help reduce insect pest numbers in the wild.

One of these pests, the western tarnished plant bug, accounted for about $71 million in cotton crop losses in 1998. One parasitoid, a tiny wasp, deposits its own egg into the tarnished plant bug eggs where it develops into an adult while consuming the other insect’s egg contents. Once the adult wasp emerges, it is ready to mate. Any female offspring is capable of parasitizing up to 60 of the other insect’s eggs in its two to four days of life as an adult.

The new diet has been found to be an inexpensive and effective way to mass rear insect pests and their natural enemies for biologically based pest management, enhancing the agricultural community’s ability to mass produce natural enemies of pests and decrease dependence on chemicals.