Natural pest control ... using bugs! - Shimon Steinberg

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I'm a bug lover myself—not from childhood, by the way—but rather late. When I bachelored a major in zoology in Tel Aviv University, I kind of fell in love with bugs. Then, within zoology, I took the course of the discipline of entomology, the science of insects. I thought to myself, how can I be practical or help in the science of entomology? I moved to the world of plant protection, plant protection from insects, from bedbugs.

Within plant protection, I came into the discipline of biological pest control, which we actually define as the use of living organisms to reduce populations of noxious plant pests. It's a whole discipline in plant protection aiming at the reduction of chemicals. Biological pest control, by the way, or these good bugs that we are talking about, exist in the world for thousands and thousands of years—for a long, long time. But only in the last hundred and twenty years have people started to know more and more how to explore, how to use this biological control phenomenon, or in fact, the natural control phenomenon to their own needs.

You can see biological control phenomena in your backyard. Just take a magnifying glass. You see what I have here—that's a magnifier, times 10, yeah. Times 10! You just open it, twist leaves, and you see a whole new world of minute insects or little spiders of one millimeter, one and a half, two millimeters long. You can distinguish between the good ones and the bad ones. This phenomenon of natural control exists literally everywhere. Here in front of this building, I'm sure, just have a look at the plants. So it's everywhere, and we need to know how to exploit it.

Well, let us look just hand by hand and browse through a few examples. What is a pest? What damage does it actually inflict on the plant? What is the natural enemy, the biological control agent, or the good bug that we are talking about? In general, I'm going to talk about insects and spiders or mites. Let us call them insects—those six select organisms and spiders or mites, the eight-legged organisms.

Let's have a look at that. Here is a pest, a devastating pest—a spider mite—because it does a lot of webbing like a spider. You see the mother in between, and two daughters probably on the left and right, and a single egg on the right-hand side. Then, you see what kind of damage it can inflict. On your right-hand side, you can see a cucumber leaf, and in the middle, a cotton leaf, and on the left, a tomato leaf with these little stipplings. They can literally turn from green to white because of the sucking, piercing mouthparts of those spiders.

But here comes nature that provides us with a good spider. This is a predatory mite, just as small as the spider mite, by the way—one millimeter, two millimeters long, not more than that—running quickly, hunting, chasing the spider mites. Here you can see this lady in action on your left-hand side. She just pierces the body fluids on the left-hand side of the pest mite, and after five minutes, this is what you see: just a typical dead corpse, shriveled, sucked out—dead corpse of the spider mite. Next to it are two satiated individuals of predatory mites: a mother on the left-hand side, a young mite on the right.

By the way, a meal for them for 24 hours is about five individuals of the spider mites or 15 to 20 eggs of the pest mites. They are hungry always. There is another example: aphids. By the way, it's springtime now in Israel. When temperatures rise sharply, you can see those bad ones—those aphids—all over the plants in your hibiscus, in your lantana on the young fresh foliage of the spring flush.

With aphids, you have only females—like Amazon females—giving rise to females, giving rise to other females. No males at all, parthenogenesis, so-called. They are very happy with that, apparently. Here you can see the damage. Those aphids secrete some sticky sugary liquid called honeydew, and this just clogs the upper part of the plant. You see a typical cucumber leaf that turned from green to black because of the black fungus mold which is covering it.

And here comes the salvation through this parasitic wasp. Here we are not talking about a predator; here we are talking about a parasite—not a two-legged parasite, but an eight-legged parasite of yours. Yeah, this is a parasitic wasp, again two meters long, slender, a very quick and sharp flyer. Here you can see this parasite in action, like in an acrobatic maneuver. She stands vis-à-vis in front of the victim on the right-hand side, bending her abdomen, and inserting a single egg—a single egg—into the body fluids of the aphid.

By the way, the aphid tries to escape; she kicks and bites and secretes different liquids, but nothing will happen. In fact, only the egg of the parasitoid will be inserted into the body fluids of the aphid. After a few days, depending upon the temperature, the egg will hatch, and the larva of this parasite will eat the aphid from the inside. This is all natural; this is not fiction—nothing at all, again in your backyard!

Absolutely! This is the end result. This is the end result: mummies—m-u-m-y. This is the visual result of a dead aphid encompassing inside, in fact, a developing parasitoid that, after a few minutes, you see halfway out. The birth is almost complete. You can see, by the way, different movies etc., and it takes just a few minutes. If this is a female, she will immediately mate with a male and off she goes, because time is very short. This female can live only three to four days, and she needs to give rise to around 400 eggs. That means she has 400 bad aphids to put her eggs into, their body fluids.

This is, of course, not the end of it. There is a whole wealth of other natural enemies, and this is just the last example. Again, we'll start first with the pest—the thrips. By the way, all these weird names, huh? I didn't bother you with the Latin names of these creatures—okay, just the popular names. But this is a nice, slender, very bad pest. If you can see this sweet pepper, this is not just an exotic or a metal sweet pepper; this is a sweet pepper which is not consumable because it is suffering from a viral disease transmitted by those thrips adults.

And here comes the natural enemy: my favorite pirate bug. My favorite, because it is rather small. You can see the adult black and two young ones, and again in action. This adult pierces the thrips, sucking it within just several minutes—just going to the other prey, continuing all over the place. If we spread those my favorite pirate bugs—the good ones, for example, in a sweet pepper plot—they go to the flowers, and look! This flower is flooded with predatory bugs, with the good ones—after wiping out the bad ones, the thrips.

So this is a very positive situation. By the way, no harm to the developing fruit; no harm to the fruit set. Everything is justified under these circumstances. But again, the question is here: you saw them on a one-to-one basis—the pest and the natural enemy. What we do is actually this: in Northeast Israel, in Kibbutz Dalia, there is a facility that mass-produces those natural enemies.

In other words, what we do there is we amplify the natural control of the biological control phenomenon. In 30,000 square meters of state-of-the-art greenhouses, we are mass producing those predatory mites, those pirate bugs, those parasitic wasps, etc., etc.—many different parts. By the way, they have a very nice landscape. You see the Jordanian mountains on one hand and the Jordan Valley on the other hand, and a good mild winter and a nice hot summer, which is excellent for mass-producing those creatures.

By the way, mass production—it is not genetic manipulation. There are no GMOs, genetically modified organisms whatsoever. We take them from nature, and the only thing that we do is give them the optimal conditions under the greenhouses or in the climate rooms in order to proliferate, multiply, and reproduce. That’s what we get.

In fact, you see under a microscope the upper left corner, where you see a single predatory mite, and this is a whole bunch of predatory mites. You see this apple; you see this one. I have one gram of those predatory mites—one gram—80,000 individuals! 80,000 individuals are good enough to control one acre, four thousand square meters, of a strawberry plot against spider mites for the whole season of almost one year. We can produce from this, believe you me, several dozens of kilograms on an annual basis.

So this is what they call amplification of the phenomenon. No, we do not disrupt the balance. On the contrary, we bring it to agricultural plots where the balance was already disrupted by the chemicals. Here we come with those natural enemies in order to reverse a little bit the wheel and to bring more natural balance to the agricultural plot by reducing those chemicals. That's the whole idea.

And what is the impact? In this table, you can actually see what is the impact of successful biological control by good bugs. For example, in Israel, where we employ more than one thousand hectares—ten thousand donuts in Israeli terms—of biological pest-controlling sweet peppers under protection, 75 percent of the pesticides were actually reduced. And in Israeli strawberries, even more—80 percent of the pesticide, especially those aimed against pest mites in strawberries. So the impact is very strong.

And there goes the question, especially if you ask growers, agriculturalists, "Why biological control? Why good bugs?" By the way, the number of answers you get equals the number of people you ask. But if we go, for example, to this place—southeast Israel, the Arava Valley, along the Great Rift Valley—where the really top-notch, the pearl of Israeli agriculture is located, especially under greenhouse conditions or under screen house conditions.

If you drive all the way to Eilat, you see this just in the middle of the desert. If you zoom in, you can definitely watch these grandparents with their grandchildren distributing the natural enemies—the good bugs—instead of wearing special clothes and gas masks and applying chemicals. So safety, with respect to the application, this is number one answer that we get from growers: why biological control?

Number two: many growers are, in fact, petrified from the idea of resistance—that the pests will become resistant to the chemicals, just as in our case that bacteria become resistant to antibiotics. It's the same. And it can happen very quickly. Fortunately, in biological control or in natural control, resistance is extremely rare. It hardly happens because this is evolution, this is the natural issue, unlike resistance which happens in the case of chemicals.

Thirdly: public demand! The more the public demands reduction of chemicals, the more growers become aware of the fact that they should, wherever they can and wherever possible, replace chemical control with biological control. Even here, there is another grower—you see, very interested in the bugs, the bad ones and the good ones—wearing this magnifier already on her head, just walking safely in her crop.

Finally, I want to get to actually my vision—or, in fact, my dream—because, you see, this is the reality. Have a look at the gap. If we take the overall turnover of the biocontrol industry worldwide, it is $250 million. Look at the overall pesticide industry in all the crops throughout the world—I think it’s times 100 or something like that: $25 billion! So there is a huge gap to bridge.

So actually, how can we do it? How can we bridge, or let's say, never disgrace this gap in the course of the years? First of all, we need to find more robust, good, and reliable biological solutions—more good bugs that we can either mass produce or actually conserve in the field. Secondly, create even more intensive and strict public demand for the reduction of chemicals in the agriculture of fresh produce. Thirdly, also to increase awareness by the growers to the potential of this industry.

And this gap really narrows step by step; it does not disappear. So I think my last slide is all we are saying: we can actually see it—give nature a chance! So I'm saying this on behalf of all the biocontrol practitioners and implementers in Israel and abroad: really, give nature a chance. Thank you.