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One of Ellsworth’s brightest Entomology Ph.D. graduate students, Tim Vandervoet, has been immersed in research that, if successful, will go a long way to help growers protect their cotton from this damaging pest while simultaneously lowering input costs.
“Conservation biological control (bio-control), or the use of abundant populations of natural enemy predators that effect suppression of crop damaging pests and the research to verify its effectiveness, has been going on for decades,” Vandervoet explains.
“Measuring at what levels these predators (or parasitoids) become effective at suppressing whitefly populations is difficult,” he says, “in part because there are many factors that influence and cause variations in those biological interactions.”
Synthetic insecticides were commercialized around World War II, and were quickly adopted by growers since they provided inexpensive and effective pest control – often, unfortunately, at the expense of existing biological controls due to their broad spectrum activity.
