The Occurrence of Apparent Competition and Apparent Mutualism in a Modeled Greenhouse System with Two Non-competing Pest
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BIOLOGICAL CONTROL
The Occurrence of Apparent Competition and Apparent Mutualism in a Modeled Greenhouse System with Two Non-competing Pests and a Shared Biocontrol Agent MIS COSTA, L ANJOS Lab Nacional de Computação Científica, Petrópolis, RJ, Brasil
Keywords Pest biological control, greenhouse-crop system, apparent competition, apparent mutualism, population dynamical model Correspondence L Anjos, Lab Nacional de Computação Científica, Av. Getúlio Vargas, 333 Quitandinha, Petrópolis, RJ25651-070, Brasil; [email protected] Edited by Yulin Gao – CAAS, China Received 4 March 2020 and accepted 22 September 2020 * Sociedade Entomológica do Brasil 2020
Abstract This work puts forward a dynamical population model to qualitatively reproduce the phenomena of apparent competition and apparent mutualism found in an experiment with two arthropods being attacked by a predator in a context of pest biological control in greenhouse crops. The two agricultural pests consist of one species of thrips (Frankliniella occidentalis (Pergande 1895)) and one species of whiteflies (Trialeurodes vaporariorum Westwood, 1956), and the shared predator is a predatory mite (Amblyseius swirskii Athias-Herriot, 1962). The predatory mite is the biocontrol agent employed in order to achieve the biological control. The proposed model successfully reproduces this density mediated indirect interactions between pests when their carrying capacities are increased. Moreover, the pests’ final population levels may depend on their initial densities and those of their predator. With these results, the proposed model may have the potential to assess whether these indirect pest interactions disrupt or enhance biological control. Additionally, it can also be used as an ancillary tool to theoretically assess the effects of pest biocontrol strategies in the referred experimental setup.
Introduction Greenhouse crops are, in general, biological managed systems under artificial conditions, and on account of that, they are often considered as simple ecosystems with low biodiversity (Enkegaard & Brødsgaard 2006). However, the infestation in greenhouse crops by different pest species is a problem with which managers frequently have to cope in pest biocontrol (Messelink 2012). A common strategy to control this sort of infestation consists of the release of natural enemies against these pests, which, in turn, adds to the species diversity of greenhouse crops. Thus, apparently simple structured greenhouse crops often accommodate complex artificial communities (i.e., artificial food webs) of multiple pests and natural enemies. In turn, these complex artificial communities can give rise to direct and indirect interactions among species, which may bring about diverse effects on the abundance of the involved populations. These effects can
have a significant bearing on the efficiency of pest biological control. In this context of multiple pests and natural enemies, Messelink (2012) performed a series of laboratory experiments to investigate the dynamics of some arthrop
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