Title of Article: Current status of viral disease spread in Korean horn beetle, Allomyrina dichotoma (Coleoptera: Scarabeidae)

Abstract

The current market size of insect industry in Korea is estimated at 300 million dollars and more than 500 local farms are related to many insect industry. One of the strong candidates for insect industry is Korean horn beetle, Allomyrina dichotoma. Early this year, we reported a viral disease extremely fatal to A. dichotoma larvae. While we were proceeding a nationwide investigation of this disease, it was informed that similar disease symptom has been occurred occasionally during past over 10 years. The symptom can be easily confused with early stage of bacterial infection or physiological damage such as low temperature and high humidity. A peroral infection with the purified virus to healthy larvae produced a result that only 21% of larvae survived and became pupae. Although some of the survived adult beetle was deformational, many of them had no abnormal appearance and even succeeded in mating. Later, these beetles were examined if they were carrying the virus, and all except one were confirmed as live virus carrier. This implies that these beetles may fly out and spread the disease to the nature. We found the evidence for this possibility by collecting a few wild A. dichotoma larvae which were virus infected, near two local farms rearing A. dichotoma larvae. So far, transovarial transmission of this virus to the eggs, or horizontal transmission to other commercially reared insects is not known yet.