Managing Mango Fruit Flies
Don’t be stressed 😰, try the Auto-Dissemination Technique
In Kenya, mango is an important commercial and food crop. Despite its economic importance, the production potential of the crop is yet to be achieved, due to certain constraining factors. Key among these factors is the mango fruit fly infestation which causes yield losses as well as income mislaying due to trade quarantine implications.
Mango farmers mainly rely on synthetic pesticides to suppress this invasive pest which, in addition to the high purchasing cost, have negative consequences on human health and the environment.
Over the last decade, the International Center of Insect Physiology and Ecology (icipe) and other partners have over and again, designed and promoted a fruit fly Integrated Pest Management (IPM) strategy as a more sustainable approach to the management of fruit flies.
Let’s have a glimpse of how the IPM Strategy works
Auto-dissemination is a technique where insects are used as smart conveyors of bio-pesticides through social behaviors. It involves the attraction of male insects into specially designed inoculation chambers in response to synthetic female sex pheromones. That means, the chambers which are strategically located on the farm, contain female sex pheromone that attracts male insects.
Upon reaching the chambers, the male insects find a spot spray of food bait and ingest it, thinking that it's food and yet its fungi. The male insects are infected with the fungi and afterward, they go ahead and interact with the female insects. This will thereby disseminate the lethal inoculant to the female insects as well. This leads to the annihilation of both the male and female insects automatically without the intervention of synthetic pesticides, hence the term, `Auto-dissemination Technique’. This has proven to have 50–70 % fatality rates for fruit flies.
This technique is a product of a pest-free fruit project with a goal to develop and promote cost-effective and system-wide bio-control strategies that contribute to the intensification of fruit production systems.
There have been spill-over effects of IPM technology on other mango alternative cultivated crops like pawpaw and citrus. The use of this technology has concomitantly led to a significant and positive effect on gross margins for these crops. Further empirical studies have indicated that adopters of IPM have higher mango yields, higher mango net income, and use fewer quantities of insecticide as well as causing less damage to the environment and human health.
