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Zoophytophagous pentatomids feeding on plants and implications for biological control

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Abstract

Zoophytophagous insects can feed on a variety of prey, plants and plant products. By studying the interactions between predatory hemipterans and plants harbouring the prey of these insects, scientists have started to establish two potential outcomes: (1) positive effects like the enhancement of their life history characteristics by acquiring plant contents; and (2) negative effects mediated by plant resistance to herbivores or prey ingesting secondary plant metabolites. Despite this research, there is a lack of information about the feeding sites of predatory hemipterans on their host plants, what they ingest from plants, and whether they cause damage to their host plants. The results presented here indicate that the xylem is one of the feeding sites of predatory hemipterans on plants. The dissection of predators that fed on plants with marked vessels and testing insects for the presence of Cry protein constitutively expressed in the cytoplasm of plant cells revealed that bugs are not able to acquire cytoplasm contents from the plant cell. In addition, we demonstrate that systemic insecticide circulating inside plants from soil applications contaminates these predators. Our results are discussed in the context of zoophytophagous feeding behaviour exhibited by predatory hemipterans and the use of systemic insecticides for the conservation of natural enemies. This interaction contradicts the concept of ecological selectivity obtained for natural enemies through the placement of systemic insecticide in the soil as a selective method of deploying chemical control and predatory hemipteran conservation within the integrated pest management framework.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Robério C.S. Neves for providing the predators, and the two anonymous reviewers and the editor for their valuable comments and corrections. This work was supported by a CNPq research grant to J.B.T., by a CNPq graduate grant to E.M.B. and by a CAPES graduate grant to R.R.C. The reported results belong to a broad project aimed at integrating predators into IPM, which is funded by the agencies FACEPE and FINEP.

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  1. Departamento de Agronomia-Entomologia, Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco, Rua Dom Manoel de Medeiros, s/n, Dois Irmãos, Recife, PE, 52171-900, Brazil

    Jorge B. Torres, Eduardo M. Barros & Roberta R. Coelho

  2. Departamento de Biologia-Botânica, Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco, Rua Dom Manoel de Medeiros, s/n, Dois Irmãos, Recife, PE, 52171-900, Brazil

    Rejane M. M. Pimentel

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  1. Jorge B. Torres
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  2. Eduardo M. Barros
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  3. Roberta R. Coelho
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  4. Rejane M. M. Pimentel
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Correspondence to Jorge B. Torres.

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Handling Editor: Stanislav Gorb.

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Torres, J.B., Barros, E.M., Coelho, R.R. et al. Zoophytophagous pentatomids feeding on plants and implications for biological control. Arthropod-Plant Interactions 4, 219–227 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11829-010-9095-2

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