Drones are dropping enemy bugs on dangerous bugs

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are widely used to treat agricultural crops around the world and to spray against disease-transmitting pests such as mosquitoes. Now researchers are expanding the experimental use of drones to control harmful insects by dropping hostile species on them.

Pest control technology against beetles delivered by drone

The use of bug versus bug isn’t new, but it’s increasing in degree and sophistication, according to a report in the June issue of the Entomological Society of America’s Journal of Economic Entomology. DroneDJ has written about other drone applications in the fight against harmful insects, but not the research that is now gaining traction in North America. This includes the use of specialized agricultural vehicles to throw off natural enemies of destructive pests in appropriate situations, thereby limiting or eliminating the need for traditional insecticides.

The technique could pay off more than most observers suspect. Harmful insects cause more than $ 100 billion in crop damage each year in the United States alone. The lucrative organic subsector of agriculture is particularly vulnerable as the rules governing what can be sold as naturally grown are generally strict, but especially draconian when it comes to pesticides. Therefore, specialists are trying to multiply applications of their equation “pests + hostile insects = fewer beetles everywhere”.

For example, reports of research in Canada describe how drones dropped competing species on harmful pests in crops – the former group known as biological controllers, or biocontrols. One such attempt involved spreading parasitic wasp eggs among destructive insects in an area of ​​cornfields and spruce trees. Once the wasps hatched and reached reproductive age, they laid their eggs in those of the unwanted beetles and eliminated the next generation of feeders before they could even fly.

That test resulted in the experiment being extended to forests, a discontinuation of previous tests appeared to indicate that it was too dense for payload-dropping drones to be effective. However, working with Quebec-based UAV service company Canopée, the researchers discovered that vehicles specially adapted to scatter parasitoids were at least as effective at releasing these insects as manual approaches and could treat much larger areas than people on foot.

Successful drones against insect pests in crops extended to forests

Attention is now shifting to teaching drones to identify harmful insects in forested areas. The hope is that they can do this in the same way that they can now monitor wildlife or locate rare plants in the natural environment and use thermal or hyperspectral imagery to analyze insect species in agricultural fields.

This latter activity was key to allowing farmers to identify pest infestations from the start, allowing them to apply smaller amounts of insecticides only to the affected areas. The use of seeing and recognizing drones has proven itself, for example, in destroying the nests of oriental moths, an invasive insect that damages fruit trees.

The specialist also worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to control the Mexican fruit fly infestation that was causing severe agricultural damage in Arizona, California and Texas. In this experiment, researchers flew swarms of adapted drones – up to 12 at a time – to release sterile fruit flies in the citrus groves of Rio Grande. The result was a sufficient decrease in their total population after mating between normal and impotent beetles did not produce offspring.

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