Integrated Control of Fruit Pests

Abstract

The concept, theory, and techniques of integrated control have been thoroughly discussed by several authors (42, 97, 98, 105, 116, 122, 126), and for the purposes of this paper the definition of integrated control presented by Smith & van den Bosch (116) will be used. The following discussion will attempt to relate this concept and these techniques to recent research on tree fruit pest management. From the advent of DDT for pest control in the mid 1940s until the 1960&, research on control of pests on tree fruits was strongly oriented toward the use of insecticides. Barnes' review of this subject in 1959 (8) points out the predominance of chemical control studies but does mention some of the early work on integration of chemical and biological control. More recently the control of pome fruit pests has been reviewed (76), and it is obvious that a considerable change in emphasis and philosophy toward research on control of fruit pests occurred in the decade between 1960 and 1970. Studies on biology, population dynamics, biological control, and integrated control received much greater emphasis. This change was, no doubt, related to the changing public attitude toward pesticides, but other factors have also played a part. Control of tree fruit pests by chemicals alone has been fraught with problems of pest resistance, resurgence, and elevation of minor pests to major pest status. Costs of pest control have mounted and in some cases ever-increasing amounts of pesticides were required to keep the large number of pest species under control or to substitute in controlling species resistant to pesticides. For these reasons the best pesticides available could be considered but temporary measures to be supplanted at a later date by another pesticide. To many research workers, the answer was a more broadly based approach to pest control. One of the outstanding examples of early integrated control programs occurred on apples in Nova Scotia (94). Subsequent to the research in Nova Scotia in the 1940s several refinements and changes have been made in the program and these have been thoroughly reviewed (72). The program developed in Nova Scotia and subsequent refinements are of major interest for two reasons. First, the early re­ search occurred at a time when most other research efforts were shifting to the use