The dominant species of natural enemies of Pentatomidae in the peak period

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse how to effectively protect and scientifically utilize the natural enemies of Pentatomidae in tea plantations in the peak period. In this paper, the spatial, quantitative and temporal relationships between Pentatomidae and its natural enemies in “Pingyangtezao”, “Wuniuzao”, “Huangshandayezhong”, “Anjibaicha”,”Longjing 43″ and “Nongkangzao” tea gardens in Hefei, China were comprehensively compared and analyzed with the methods of geostatistical analysis, gray system analysis and temporal ecotone overlap index analysis. According to the size of the closeness index, the top three natural enemies with the largest sum of spatial, quantitative, and temporal closeness indexes in the six tea gardens were Clubiona japonicola (X7, 16.514), Oxyopes sertatus (X5, 16.390) and Xysticus ephippiafus (X2, 16.270). The size of the ratio between the number of Pentatomidae individuals and natural enemies largely determines whether the natural enemies follow Pentatomidae pests closely or not. The better the growth of tea plantations and the richer the diversity of pest species, the more accurately the predation preference of natural enemies can be reflected. In the control of Pentatomidae, specific analysis should be made according to the occurrence characteristics of target pests in different tea plantations and the basic attributes of tea plantations (species, growth, population characteristics of natural enemies and pests, etc.) in order to scientifically utilize its natural enemies.

Evaluating the competition intensity of wandering spiders feeding on Empoasca onukii under varying cicada–spider ratios in tea plantations

“…As a predatory natural enemy, wandering spiders are active hunters, demonstrating a high level of predation on a broad range of prey over a wide home range, and therefore play an important role in the control of pests and provide balance to the ecosystem (Enders 1975). There have been many reports on the use of predatory natural enemies for the biological control of pests in tea plantations (Chen et al 2023a(Chen et al , 2023bCheng et al 2022;Qian et al 2019;Zhang et al 2021). Most of these studies have directly discussed natural enemy species with the greatest association with pests; however, by unifying the relationship between natural enemies and pest populations according to some criteria, the effect of the ratio of the number of individuals of E. onukii to the number of wandering spiders of different species (referred to as cicada-spider ratios in this article) on the competitive effects of wandering spiders has rarely been studied.…”