El2-Lancaster Farming, Saturday, March 21,1M7
WASHINGTON - Female
tobacco budworms have been
tricked into performing a scientific
first sterilizing all their male
descendants. U.S. Department of
Agriculture entomologists go their
“femme fatales” by mating male
budworms (WslhlMi rirwe—«J with
females of a related, harmless
insect fMMMiMMuai.
Hie resulting hybrid produces
not only sterile sons but female
descendants that continually pass
on the male sterility trait, said
Marion L. Laster of the depart
ment’s Agricultural Research
Service.
He said hybrids could save
farmers millions of dollars lost to
the crop-damaging budworm,
which resists chemicals almost as
fast as researchers can create
them.
This ability to develop chemical
resistance caught fanners in
Northeast Mexico and the lower
Rio Grande Valley of Texas off
guard in the 1960 s and destroyed
much of the cotton industry there,
said Edgar G. King, Lester’s
colleague at the Southern Field
Crop Insect Management
Laboratory in Stoneville, Miss.
Already this pest of cotton.
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Female Tobacco Budworms Offer Pest Control Service
tobacco, tomatoes and other
vegetables is showing resistance to
the most effective chemicals
registered for use against it the
pyrethroids.
“When resistance is widespread,
probably in about three years, we
expect to be ready with this new
genetic control technology,” said
King.
Laster and King, in cooperation
with other agency scientists, tested
the new hybrids with a natural
budworm population on St. Croix in
the U.S. Virgin Islands. Sterility
infiltrated the male population
there enough to reduce the
number of insects by 75 percent.
“A sterile male can keep females
busy two of the three nights they’re
looking to mate that’s a lot of
eggs kept unfertilised,” King said.
Theoretically, the nude sterility
could go on indefinitely, Laster
said. But in a real situation, yearly
release of hybrid females might be
necessary, because hybrid insects
could migrate away, as normal
wild ones come in, possibly even
from Mexico or South America.
Using sterile males to control
insects isn’t new; what is new is
that now females do the male
sterilization usually done with
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radiation in a lab. Radiation Also, first generation hybrid males until the femhles become
weakens budworms and makes females wouldn’t be used, because more “themselves” again; only
them poor competitors for female they are too much like their sub- then are sons and daughter!
attention, so until now sterile flexa cousins to be sexually at- carrying the sterility released into
release was impractical for this tractive to males. Scientists cross the wild,
pest. hybrids with normal budwonn
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