Tropical Forest Insect Pests

This book has grown out of my feeling that tropical forest insects have not received the research attention they deserve. Most books on forest entomology deal with only temperate forest insects and those few that deal with tropical forest insects cover only small regions of the tropics and mostly contain descriptions of pest biology. An exception is a recent book by M. R. Speight and F. R. Wylie (2001) which covers the entire tropics and lays stress on pest management, although their coverage of the subject is very general. Other books on tropical forest entomology covering parts of the tropics are mentioned in the introduction to Chapter 2: particular mention must be made of C. F. C. Beeson’s (1941) excellent treatise on the ecology and control of forest insects of India and the neighbouring countries. This book, published some 65 years ago, contains much information that is valid and relevant even today, although it is not accessible to many. Extensive new knowledge has now accumulated on tropical forest insects across the world, but it lies scattered in innumerable journal articles and reports. I have made an attempt in this book to bring this knowledge together and present it in an ecological framework. Knowledge is seldom created by one individual and I have used the knowledge accumulated over time by the dedicated work of innumerable researchers. What is new here is a new framework on which the accumulated knowledge is organized to convey some central ideas relevant to the management of tropical forest insect pests. Facts or observations make sense only when arranged logically and interpreted. My attempt has been to provide an overview of tropical forest insect pests and discuss the basic principles of their ecology in the forest environment, using information about commonly encountered insects across the tropics.