15AGRITECHCAT4: Early attractants for the major new fruit pest, Drosophila suzukii; a 'super lure'

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This project addresses Challenge 4 in the UK Strategy for Agricultural Technologies: Develop integrated approaches to the effective management of crop weeds, pests and diseases within farming systems. There are increasing demands from the public as citizens and consumers, from governments and from growers themselves to reduce use of chemical insecticides and to adopt a more integrated approach to pest management. Integrated pest management involves use of a wide range of cultural and control approaches to reduce or avoid the use of chemical insecticides. One such approach is the use of semiochemicals which control insect behaviour. These can be used in various ways. Attractants can be used to bait traps to monitor for the presence of a pest, an essential component of integrated pest management. Large numbers of traps can be used to control pests by mass trapping or pests can be attracted to a killing agent or a microbial infective agent. Synthetic semiochemicals can also be used to disrupt the normal communication pathways between insects and/or their hosts. Semiochemicals have many advantages as crop protection agents. Those based on natural products are typically nontoxic to animals and plants in that they act by modifying behaviour rather than killing. They often highly biologically active so only small amounts are required to be effective and they are typically non-persistent. Furthermore, because of their mode of action they are less likely to induce resistance in the pests.

This project aims to develop a more powerful and more specific semiochemical attractant for what has become the major single pest of soft and stone fruit in Europe and the USA, spotted wing Drosophila, Drosophila suzukii. The project is being carried out in collaboration with a commercial partner, Real IPM, who will benefit directly from having new products to market that are more effective than those of competitors. These are likely to include traps and lures for monitoring D. suzukii and control devices based on lure-and-kill with an insecticide and lure-and-infect with a mycopesticide, Met69, already produced by Real IPM. It is estimated fruit susceptible to D. suzukii is grown on 13,700 ha in the UK (FAOSTAT UK crop data for 2013), a potential market for 13,700 monitoring traps and at least one million lure-and-kill or lure-and-infect devices in the UK alone.

Project partners include Berry Gardens, a cooperative of growers who will benefit from having improved control of a key pest. Soft and stone fruit grown in the UK has an estimated value of £422 million (FAOSTAT UK crop data for 2013). A
conservative estimate of 20% lost to damage by D. suzukii implies a potential saving of £84 million pa in the UK alone.

At present the only effective control method against D. suzukii is the insecticide chlorpyrifos. Development of effective monitoring traps and control devices based on attractants will help reduce the amount of insecticide used in line with the UK Government's Strategy for Agricultural Technologies and the demands from supermarkets and the public in general. This project will help to sustain and grow the size and competitiveness of the UK fruit and ancillary industries, and the increased commercial economic return and less waste will impact on many governmental initiatives and goals for UK food production. The government wants the UK horticultural sector to double its production and become more "Food Secure". This can only be done by intensifying production and reducing waste in a sustainable manner as the area of land for production is not increasing. There is a growing demand for safe, nutritious, high quality, produce. Satisfying this from domestic sources will lead to reductions in the environmental impact of food miles and increase in local employment. Environmental land management schemes such as LEAF, ELS and HLS rely on sustainable intensification and maintenance of biodiversity.