APPROACHES AND PRACTICES IN PEST

MANAGEMENT
ECOLOGICAL CONCEPTS

Importance
1. Managing pests often relies on exploiting a pest’s
ecological weaknesses
2. One may manage the ecology in order to make a
crop less vulnerable to pests
3. Future of IPM lies in increasingly sophisticated
ecological manipulations
Basic concepts about agricultural ecosystems

Ecosystem or ecological system

- is the system or unit of a biological organization
formed by all organisms of a certain area in
interaction with the physical environment (ex.
lowland, upland, forest, grassland, etc.)

Agroecosystem - an ecosystem that develops on

farmed land, and includes the indigenous
microorganism, plants and animals, and the crop
species
Components of ecosystem

1. abiotic - non-living components

2. biotic - living components
a. producer - autotrophs, mostly green plants
b. consumer - heterotrophs, organisms that eat
organism or organic matter formed by
particles
c. decomposers - feeds on dead plant and animal
matter; chiefly m.o. & small invertebrates
 Ecosystem organization/level
(biotic components)

1. individual - a single organism (bacterium, weed,

nematode, insect)
2. population - a group of organism of the same
species, variety that live inside a given
area
3. community - is the population that exists and
interacts in a given area
In ecological concept, it is important to study the population and
the attributes of the interrelation that all populations have with
each other (biotic community) and with abiotic part (ecosystem)
 Factors that determine
the magnitude of a population
1. population - a population becomes pest when its
presence is not desirable from human’s point
of view
- is a biological form wherein its characteristics
are modified as time passes through a
process called evolution
 Factors that determine
the magnitude of a population
2. Population growth - population restricts
themselves to places accessible to food and
essential biological and physical elements and
become a pest when they grow to such a point
where it cause damage being grown by the
farmer
 Factors that determine
the magnitude of a population
¨ biotic potential - is inherent power that a
population has to increase in number under ideal
environmental conditions
¨ environmental resistance - is formed by the
group of biotic and abiotic factors that prevent
organisms from reaching their biotic potential or to
continue with it
 Factors that determine
the magnitude of a population
3. Extrinsic environmental resistance - external factors that
decrease the fertility and survival of individual
- includes biotic (food supplies, habitat, disease, predators) and
abiotic factor (temperature, humidity)

a. tolerance theory - explains the form in which the abiotic factors

determine the size of the population and is based on the
concept of the tolerance law

tolerance law - for each one of the abiotic factors, an

organisms has tolerance limits in which it can survive,
thus any abiotic factor outside the upper or lower
extreme limit, tends to limit the opportunity for survival
for the organism.
 Factors that determine
the magnitude of a population
b. biological diversity - provides abundant
interactions among species which function as
an extrinsive restrictive factor for each of
them
 Factors that determine
the magnitude of a population
3. Intrinsic environmental resistance
- are factors that affect the population growth that are
generated inside the population itself; appears when
the members of the population compete among
themselves caused by interspecific competition which
results to:
a. territoriality - a form of interspecific competition through
which the organism depends the area needed from other
members of its own species
b. social tension - an organism has individual distance in which
the presence of other organism of the same species
generates various adverse reactions which can affect the
capacity of the organism to reproduce and survive
Three levels of IPM implementation

1. Population level - control of a single pest

species in an individual crop
2. Community level - management of pest (insects,
weeds, or pathogens) for a single crop
3. Ecosystem level - management of all pests
within entire cropping system
Levels of organization in an ecosystem
Major interactions
within the community
1. Competition - for limited supplies of essential
resources, such as food in case of animals, water,
nutrients and light for plants
a. intraspecific - competition between individual of
the same species; can be contest type (some
individual survive at the expense of others) or
scramble (all individual obtain insufficient
resources)
b. interspecific - competition between individual of
different species; one species is likely to be
superior to the other in a given habitat
Major interactions within the community

2. Predation
- is the consumption of
one organism by
another where the
consumed organism
(prey) was alive when
the predator first
attacked it
 Major interactions
within the community
3. Parasitism - a relationship between two species in which the host
is harmed, but not killed immediately, and the species feeding
on it is benefited
b. parasitoid - an insect pest
parasitizes and kills other insects,
a. parasite - an organism that obtain parasitic only in their immature
its organic nutrients from one or stages, killing the host before
very few individual without emerging as a mature larva/adult
causing immediate death
 Major interactions
within the community

4. Mutualism - relationship
between two species that
both are benefited from
their association

5. Commensalism - association
between two species in which
one species benefits from the
association, and the other is
unaffected
 Ecosystem ecology

Food chain - is a succession of organisms in a

community that constitutes a feeding sequence in
which food energy is transferred from one organism
to the next
 Ecosystem ecology

Food web
- is the complex
interrelated food
chain in a
community

Trophic structure -
is the series of
links in a food
web that describe
the transfer of
energy from
nutritional level to
the next
 Ecosystem ecology

Trophic level - each level in the chain

 Trophic levels

1. First trophic level - is the primary producer that

produces energy through the process of
photosynthesis
ex. plants - crops & weeds (since it competes
with crops is called competitors)
2. Second trophic level - composed of organism that cannot produce their own food
and called eaters or consumers
Types of consumers
a. primary consumers - composed of c. tertiary consumers
organisms that feed on living plants; - are organism that feed on
if they compete with man’s needs, secondary consumers
they are called “pest” (insects,
pathogens, rodents & birds)
b. secondary consumers - are organism
that feed on primary consumers;
when consumers control pests, they
are considered a natural enemies
because they attack the “pest”
3. Third trophic level - are detrivores or scavengers
that feed only on dead or dying animals and
plants; recycle nutrients back into the soil
ex. bacteria
fungi
nematodes
insects