Impact of different pest management practices on natural enemy population in tea plantations of Assam special emphasis o
- PDF / 379,604 Bytes
- 7 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 27 Downloads / 150 Views
ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE
Impact of different pest management practices on natural enemy population in tea plantations of Assam special emphasis on spider fauna Anjali Km. Prasad 1 & Somnath Roy 1 & Souvik Sen 1,2 & Suzanne Neave 3 & Akanksha Nagpal 4 & Vinod Pandit 4 Received: 21 July 2019 / Accepted: 15 January 2020 # African Association of Insect Scientists 2020
Abstract Tea is a perennial monoculture crop infested by approximately thousand species of pests. Conserving natural enemies is an important practice under non-conventional pest management strategy. In the present study, occurrence of spider population on tea in three different pest management practices has been studied in three different agro climatic region of Assam. The three pest management practices include: 1. Ecological Crop Management (ECM: wherein pest management is achieved with cultural practices, mechanical practices and biopesticide excluding synthetic pesticides); 2. Integrated pest management (IPM: includes recommended IPM practices with use of only CIB recommended approved dose of synthetic pesticides); 3. Garden practice (GP: involves normal practices being followed in tea garden). During the study, very high incidence of natural enemy population was recorded under ECM followed by IPM and the least with GP. Spiders are the most common predators and constituted about 50– 90% of the total natural enemy count. Number of spiders captured during monsoon was significantly higher than pre-monsoon and post monsoon. Family Salticidae was found to be the dominant group among the recorded spider taxa. The study inferred that though ecologically managed plantations encourage the spider diversity along with different natural enemies, integrated management practices can also be adopted by conventional garden for better natural enemy population if going to ECM is not at all been an option. Keywords Natural enemies . Spiders . Tea plantations . Ecological crop management . Integrated pest management
Introduction Settlement and growth of human society and consequential advent of intensive agriculture has prompted evolution of crop pests. It is unlikely that complete eradication of any insect pest will be possible as most of the insects have high reproductive rates and can easily adapt to environmental changes including challenges faced from application of synthetic pesticides. In
* Somnath Roy [email protected] 1
Entomology Department, Tocklai Tea Research Institute, Tea Research Association, Cinnamara, Jorhat, Assam 785008, India
2
Present address: Zoological Survey of India, Western Ghat Regional Centre, Jaferkhan Colony, Kozhikode, Kerala Pin 673 006, India
3
CABI, Nosworthy Way, Wallingford, UK
4
CABI - South Asia, NASC Complex, 2nd Floor, CG Block, D P Shastri Marg, Pusa, New Delhi 110 012, India
the era of increasing concern for food security and to enhance the productivity, farmers relay upon completely on the synthetic pesticides for instant solution of pest problem (Tilman et al. 2001). Pesticide use for controlling the pests of
Data Loading...
