BENEFICIAL INSECTARY, INC. — Department of Agriculture SBIR Phase I: 8.3

Description

Development of rearing methods for the biological control agent Tachinaephaguszealandicus.House flies (Musca domestica) are global pests associated with animal agriculture.Insecticideresistance and growing demand for organic products is increasing the need for alternativemethods of fly control. Parasitic wasps ("parasitoids") have been a success in biological flycontrol and several commercial insectaries produce and sell them.However these species onlyattack the fly after it has reached the pupal stage.Tachinaephagus zealandicus is a parasitoidthat attacks the larvae and would be a helpful compliment to pupal parasitoids. Previous effortsto commercialize this species have been unsuccessful because of rearing challenges. They cannotbe reared on house flies which is used for producing the other parasitoids sold for fly control.Blow flies and Sarcophaga spp. can be used to produce T. zealandicus but they are expensiveand require major modifications to production systems that are optimized for house flies. Recentresearch has shown that another fly Hydrotaea aenesscens can serve as a host for thisparasitoid. Moreover H. aenescens can be mass-reared using methods similar to those used forhouse flies.We propose to start new colonies of T. zealandicus from wild populations anddevelop production protocols using H. aenescens as a host. We will then scale production up to acommercial scale and determine the economics of producing this species as a product.We anticipate that the project will result in determining that T. zealandicus can be mass-rearedon H. aenescens at a cost that is somewhat higher than pupal parasitoids but still at a price pointto make this a competitive product in the fly control marketplace. Moreover we anticipate thatthis will provide the groundwork for a Phase II proposal in which the efficacy of T. zealandicusfor fly control will be established in on-farm trials.