Amblyseius eharai is a good candidate for biological control agent for major agricultural pest mites such as twospotted spider mites, rust mites, etc. in orchard systems. A. eharai is a native predatory mite of East Asia, and is one of the abundant predatory mites in orchards in Korea. However, ecological studies on this species including its reproductive ability have not been studied yet. Thus, in this study, temperature-dependent developmental rate of adult A. eharai, and three major oviposition related models were studied using six constant temperatures (18.0, 21.6, 24.1, 27.4, 30.2 and 33.2 ℃) with Tetranychus urticae as prey. Temperature-dependent developmental rate, survival rate and oviposition rate of A. eharai adults were well described with a non-linear equation (r2=0.99), a reverse sigmoid function (r2=0.94), and a Weibull function (r2=0.98), respectively. The fecundity was fitted with an Extreme value function (r2=0.99) and the highest in 24.3 ℃. These results would be helpful to verify the abilities of A. eharai as a bio-control agent in the fruit trees.

• Young-gyun Park(Entomology program, Department of Agricultural Biotechnology, Seoul National University)
• Sunghoon Baek(Entomology program, Department of Agricultural Biotechnology, Seoul National University)
• Joon-Ho Lee(Entomology program, Department of Agricultural Biotechnology, Seoul National University, Research Institute of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Seoul National University)