Portal de Cartagena
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There are more than 65 populations with thousands of insects.
They live in two laboratories of the School of Agronomists of the Polytechnic University of Cartagena (UPCT).
They do not understand confinement, or parties, or vacations, or the closure of university facilities.To survive, every two or three days they need three people to feed and change the green beans, the substrate they use to lay their eggs.
These 'bugs' are 'unique breeds' that have been selected by researchers from the 'Crop Protection' group over 20 years, says the responsible researcher, Pablo Bielza.
These insects, which live in the School of Agronomists, allow to experiment and test insecticide resistant species and others to improve the biological control of pests.There are populations of thrips, aphids, whiteflies, caterpillars, resistant to insecticides that have been carefully selected for years.
There are also predatory insects, such as Orius laevigatus, which are used in the biological control of pests as important as thrips, which mainly attack the pepper.
In this case "they are improved breeds that have been selected to have better performance in the field as biological control agents," says the professor.The objective of all the works is to achieve a more sustainable agriculture.
For example, «one breed is more cold tolerant and more effective in winter, another breed is able to feed on pollen and survive when there is no prey, another breed is resistant to natural pyrethrins used in organic farming and another has a larger body size which allows it to prey on larger prey ».These are some of the selected races, but over the years, after hours and hours of work, researchers have achieved many others.They cannot be lost.
They are unrecoverable.
We have unique breeds in the world, which we have started to test this year, "says Bielza, professor of Plant Production.
To maintain them, every three days three research contractors and fellows go to the two laboratories, with the safe-conduct issued by the UPCT: Carolina Grávalos, Nerea Celdrán and Amador Rodríguez.These three people feed them with plants produced in the Tomás Ferro experimental farm.
In addition, a fruit shop in Cartagena is responsible for supplying each of the 52 weeks of the year with eight kilos of green beans for researchers to change the substrate.
"Many of them are the first starting point to develop new insecticides" and, precisely because of that, "multinationals, such as Corteva (Dow and DuPont), BASF or Bayer, hire us," added the professor.These insects allow four investigations to be carried out: the European project Superpests (773902) on how to combat "super pests", such as thrips, aphids and whiteflies, which are resistant to insecticides; the national project to improve the biological control agent Orius laevigatus for resistance to insecticides (AGL2017-89600-R); and two regional Seneca Foundation projects on improving this predator O.
laevigatus for larger body size (20791 / PI / 18), and another field demonstration (proof of concept) of a new improved breed of this predator ( 21082 / PDC / 19) in collaboration with the company Agrobío, a Spanish biological control multinational.Despite the confinement, the group's investigations are not stopped.
Some experiments are stopped but others, such as the one carried out by the PhD student José Enrique Mendoza, are being carried out from home.
Mendoza focuses his work on biological control and records how long the Orius stored at low temperatures lasts.
This is important to know to which countries they can be supplied.
Source: UPCT
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