No sex please, we’re insect pests
1 Aug 08
Centre for Environmental Stress and Adaptation Research(CESAR) researchers at Bio21 Institute have found that when insect pests have a stable environment with abundant resources - such as grain crops, orchards, vineyards, pastures and plantations where the same crops are grown every season - they were four times more likely to reproduce without sex compared to insects overall.
The findings have implications for pest control in that "increasing the complexity and variability of agricultural environments provides a way of potentially controlling asexual pest species," says Professor Ary Hoffmann from CESAR.
"The advantage farmers have is that asexual pests will have difficulty overcoming control methods that require the evolution of changes at multiple genes, which is more easily achieved with sexual reproduction where two sets of genes combine to produce a more variable genetic make-up than just cloning," added Dr Andrew Weeks from the department of Genetics at the University of Melbourne.
Asexual insect species should exhibit slower adaption to pest resistant plants and chemical or biological controls. See University of Melbourne, Media Release Wednesday 23 July 2008
