Control of Pests and Weeds by Natural Enemies An Introduction to Biological Control

This book replaces another on the same subject published in 1996 by the senior author and Thomas Bellows, Jr., of the University of California, whose earlier contributions we acknowledge. This new book builds on and updates the view of biological control that was presented in that earlier book. One important change has been an extensive effort to treat insect and weed biological control with equal depth in all of the book’s topic areas. This was facilitated immeasurably by Ted Center of the USDA-ARS invasive plants laboratory. While superficially similar, weed and insect biological control differ profoundly in a long list of particulars, not least of which being that plants rarely respond to attack by sudden death (the universal currency for scoring arthropod biological control), but by a wide range of lesser impacts that accumulate and interact. We have covered topics such as natural enemy host-range estimation, agent colonization, and impact evaluation, to name a few, in ways that work for both pest insects and invasive weeds. We have also included a chapter (Chapter 12) that is distinctly focused on classical weed biological control. Another major change is our effort to fully confront both the non-target impacts associated with biological control and the technical features of host-range measurement and prediction that are the tools for better future practice. Three chapters address these aspects. Chapter 16 provides a summary of important historical stages in the development of classical biological control relevant to non-target impacts, including discussions of many widely emphasized cases. Chapter 17 summarizes issues and techniques relevant to predicting host ranges of new agents and Chapter 18 considers indirect effects and whether, as a potential means to limit such effects, it might be feasible to predict the efficacy of an agent before its release.