Greetings,
I am currently carrying out an investigation related to the parasitism of Diaphorina citri (vector of the HuangLongBing virus) with the parasitoid Tamarixia radiata (imported) and many people have asked me: Why are you doing it in a greenhouse and not in the field? Which is an understandable doubt given that the final purpose of the research is to release it in the field to exercise its respective control over the psyllid, however, my current answer is: It is necessary to evaluate the parasitism under controlled conditions because the data obtained will be more Accurate, which is necessary because it is an imported agent, if it were native it could be evaluated without problems directly in the field. In addition to that I will be able to determine which are the most favorable conditions (temperature, humidity and light intensity) for the massive rearing of the parasitoid. Finally, research carried out in the laboratory always has specific objectives that in the field would be very difficult to achieve because there are many influencing factors that can alter the data. In my specific case, I am interested in filming the parasitic process in time-lapse and developing a parasitism test according to the nymphal stage of the psyllid. I would like to know what your responses would be to a question like this.
Dear Axel,
I am in agreement with your statements. In such cases of Biological Studies of insect specially the behavior of parasitoids, researchers really need manipulated controlled situation to go straight ahead in their research.
I just searched about your discussed issue in Google scholar by entering keywords like tamarixia radiata+diaphorina citrus and came across many interesting publications which I sent you two of them and you see in the methodology that all such researches have been done in a controlled condition. Good luck.
Best, Elaheh
I think the idea of researching the effectiveness of a particular parasitoid against a pest insect under greenhouse condition is totally fine. It can boldly be argued that greenhouse evaluation of pest control through imported biological control agent comes ahead of field trials of similar objectives. Specifically, you are also interested in capturing the parasitism process in action. That will be more suitable in a greenhouse environment. But I also encourage you to conduct some lab trials depending on your resource availability.
Hi Axel
I hope this email finds you well. I studied your attached file, please consider that a lot of researchers throughout the world developed models that show the indoor air conditions in the greenhouse such as temperature, humidity, and CO2 that comes from solving mass and heat equations with considering transpiration. So if you have the tolerable range of T (temperature) and H%( relative humidity) of this insect, u can find the best greenhouse for your research. but I suggest u select tomato greenhouse because in this greenhouse the humidity and temperature change more in comparison with other citrus or flowers. Thus u can obtain better results.
best regards
Danial
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