Mass rearing technology for biological control agents of Lygus spp.

Lygus lineolaris (Palisot de Beauvois), the tarnished plant bug, and Lygus hesperus Knight, the Western tarnished plant bug, are important pests of ma ny crops in the Eastern and Western United States, respectively. Alternativ es to conventional insecticides for control of these pests are of increasin g interest, in part because of the advance of the boil weevil eradication p rogram and the introduction of transgenic plants. Several parasitoids and p redators are candidates for use in augmentative biological control, as a co mponent of area wide IPM for Lygus spp. management. These include the paras itoids Anaphes iole Girault, Peristenus stygicus Loan, and Leiophron unifor mis (Gahan); and the predators Geocaris punctipes (Say), Orius insidiosus ( Say), and possibly even Chrysoperla spp. To be useful, these natural enemie s must be available in large numbers, and thus arises the need for mass rea ring techniques. Currently, even for those species that are available from commercial sources, rearing systems do not have the capacity to produce the se insects in sufficient numbers to support biological control of Lygus spp . in crops such as cotton. This paper reviews some of the progress that is being made in the development of up-scaled systems for rearing both Lygus s pp. and predators and parasitoids that attack these important pests.