A Color Handbook of
Biological Control in Plant Protection
Neil Helyer, Kevin Brown and Nigel D. Cattlin
Timber
Press
Portland, OR, 2003
126 pp., $39.95
ISBN: 0-88192-599-3
This handbook seems to have been developed mainly for a lay
audience. With >400 high-quality color photographs, the book will be
useful to farmers, extension officers, consultants, or students
interested in the diversity of organisms important in biological
control of pest insects, mites, snails, slugs, and sowbugs. It will
be of particular relevance to the home gardener or horticultural
professional interested in identifying pests and natural enemies
found in the backyard environment. The book is written mostly from a
European perspective, but because many pest and natural enemy
species are cosmopolitan or related to the species present in
Europe, it will also have applicability to other areas of the world
with similar environments or cropping systems.
The book is divided into four sections. The first section covers
major pest species, notable biological control agents, and the
importance of pesticides and other management practices in three
crop environments: arable crops, fruit production, and protected
crop systems such as glasshouses. The subsection on arable crops
focuses on the cultivated production of various field crops and also
"set aside" land uses for game cover or natural regeneration. The
subsection on fruit production systems describes methods of
integrating pesticide use with natural enemies to limit pest damage.
A protected crop systems subsection discusses the need for coupled
crop and pest monitoring and the evolution of glasshouse biological
control. This first section of the handbook ends with a subsection
providing practical tips for gardeners hoping to maximize use of
parasitoids, predators, and pathogens in backyard pest control.
The second section of this book provides profiles for common pest
species that are often suppressed by various natural enemies. The
major pest groups addressed include beetles, weevils, leaf miners,
fungus gnats, whiteflies, aphids, psyllids, leafhoppers, mealybugs,
scale insects, caterpillars, thrips, spider mites, slugs, snails,
and sow bugs. A short identification guide at the beginning of this
section orients the reader to each pest group using color pictures,
plant damage symptoms, and pest characteristics for each of these
pest groups along with pictures of commonly associated natural
enemies. This is followed by pictures of several typical species in
each pest group coupled with a more detailed description of the
pests and their natural enemies.
Sections 3 and 4 comprise the majority of the handbook and provide
profiles for beneficial arthropods and entomopathogens,
respectively. For both sections, profiles include a listing of
species characteristics including organism size, details on the
typical life cycle, a listing of common crop and pest associations,
and how growing practices affect the natural enemies. The treatment
of beneficial arthropods was limited but presented a representative
overview of predators found in European natural, cultivated, and
greenhouse systems by covering 60 species including ladybird beetles
(10 species), ground beetles (11 species), rove beetles (5 species),
tiger beetles (1 species), earwigs (1 species), dance flies (2
species), cecidomyid midges (2 species), hoverflies (3 species),
predatory bugs (11 species), lacewings (2 species), predatory mites
(9 species), centipedes (2 species), harvestmen (1 species), and
five families of spiders. However, the major importance of ants and
wasps as predators was not mentioned. In addition, I felt that
hymenopterous parasitoids were short-changed by including only 17
species, which were not organized by taxonomic family. Discussed
parasitoids seemed biased in favor of those attacking aphids (6
species) and did not include any species outside the Hymenoptera,
e.g., Diptera. The section on entomopathogens included treatment of
four species of nematodes, one bacterium (Bacillus thuringiensis),
four fungi, and one baculovirus.
References were not provided throughout the text but as a single
summary page, which focused mainly on publications produced in
Europe. A list of further readings failed to include a number of
dated but still highly relevant historical texts but did provide a
nice listing of world wide web sites. A glossary of biological
control terms and subject and taxonomic indices were included and
would be useful to many readers. In summary, the greatest use of
this handbook may be the many high-quality colored pictures and its
use by a lay audience in an initial orientation to the field of
applied biological control.
Joseph G. Morse
Department of Entomology
University of California
Riverside, California
Environmental Entomology
Vol. 35, No. 6, December 2006, Page 1718 - 1719
