Melon thrips, Thrips palmi Karny (Thysanoptera: Thripidae) is a worldwide polyphagous pest. The management of this pest have mainly relied on chemical agents. However, the overuse is harmful to the environment and results in insects resistance. Therefore, alternative eco-friendly control methods that have different mode of action, such as biological control, are necessary to overcome the current issue. In this study, we isolated entomopathogenic fungi from Korean soil, and characterized them via morphological and molecular techniques and pathogenicity assay against Tenebrio molitor larvae. The isolated fungi were screened for virulence against T. palmi under laboratory conditions and the results were used to establish a thrips-pathogenic fungal library. The highly virulent isolates were selected and further characterized for optimum culture conditions and application as biopesticide in the field.

Melon thrips, Thrips palmi Karny (Thysanoptera: Thripidae) is a serious insect pest of various crops in the world. The management of this pest mainly have relied on chemical agents. However, the overuse of chemical agents for long times causes insect resistance, and negative effects on environment. Therefore, alternative control methods, such as biological control, that are less harmful to the environment and have different mode of action are needed to control this pest. In this study, we isolated entomopathogenic fungi from Korean soil, and characterized them via morphological and molecular identifications and pathogenicity check against Tenebrio molitor larvae. The isolated fungi were subjected to virulence assay against T. Palmi with a conidial suspension of 1×107 conidia/ml in laboratory conditions. This entomopathogenic fungi library would be a good resource to select effective strains for the control of T. palmi in fields.

For our survey of insecticidal resistance of Palm thrips (Thrips palmi Karny), we established the discriminating time (DT) and concentration (DC) of nine insecticides, and we conducted a bioassay about seven local populations via leaf-dipping methods. The discriminating times of the recommended concentration (RC) were 24 h at emamectin benzoate EC and spinetoram SC, 48 h at chlorfenapyr EC, 72 h at spinosad SC, cyantraniliprole EC, acetamiprid WP, dinotefuran WG, imidacloprid WP and thiacloprid SC after treatment. The DC estimated the concentration which showed the difference within the mortalities of these local populations. The DCs were emamectin benzoate EC 0.013 mg L-1 (RC, 10.8 mg L-1), spinetoram SC 0.125 mg L-1 (RC, 25.0 mg L-1), chlorfenapyr EC 0.25 mg L-1 (RC, 50.0 mg L-1), spinosad SC 0.083 mg L-1 (RC, 50.0 mg L-1) and cyantraniliprole EC 5.0 mg L-1 (RC, 50.0 mg L-1), and DCs of neonicotinoids were their RCs, that is, acetamiprid WP (RC, 40.0 mg L-1), dinotefuran WG (RC, 20.0 mg L-1), imidacloprid WP (RC, 50.0 mg L-1) and thiacloprid SC (RC, 50.0 mg L-1). From our investigation into the resistance of the local populations with DT and DC application, the neonicotinoid insecticides have shown a high resistant level for all the local populations, and the other insecticides have demonstrated low or non-resistance. In the use of neonicotinoid insecticides to control Palm thrips, one must take caution. As a result, the establishment of DT and DC in the single dose bioassay method was helpful for surveying the insecticide response dynamics and the development of an insecticide resistance management strategy.

The first record of Melon thrips, Thrips palmi Karny, was in 1993 in Korea, and the species has become severe pest in agricultural industry. We used two different SDMs(Species Distribution Model) which have different approaches to analyse potential distribution of the pest species in climate change scenario, MaxEnt and CLIMEX. The MaxEnt model uses historical occurrence records with environmental variables to estimate the realized niche, and CLIMEX model simulates the fundamental niche of the object based on the seasonal phenology. In MaxEnt simulation, we reduced the number of variables to avoid multi-collinearity problem until we had no pairs with an absolute Pearson correlation coefficient higher than 0.8. BIO1(Annual Mean Temperature), BIO2(Mean diurnal range), BIO3(Isothermality), BIO4(Temperature seasonality) were finally selected as predictor, and we used 10 fold cross validation option to replicate. The averaged results were used to index analysis. The CLIMEX results, The Ecoclimate Index(EI), were also normalized in 0 to 1 scale to analysis. Under RCP 8.5 climate change scenario, in 2070s, the distribution of Thrips palmi was predicted to expand their territory overall agricultural area in Korea.