Objective

At the end of this topic, students are expected to:

• Discuss the concept of insect pest
• Identify the different classification of insect pest based on feeding habits
• Discuss how insect pest damage or destroy crops
• Discuss and assess pest damage and injury in a certain crop pest status

Learning Content
Chapter III. The Concept of an Insect Pest

Introduction
Pest insects can have adverse and damaging impacts on agricultural production and market
access, the natural environment, and our lifestyle. Pest insects may cause problems by damaging crops
and food production, parasitising livestock, or being a nuisance and health hazard to humans.
In this module, it dicusses the concept of insect pest, it includes also the different classification of
insects according to the type of food eaten.and assessment of pest stutus to certain crops.
A pest is any living organism, whether animal, plant or fungus, which is invasive or troublesome to
plants or animals, human or human concerns, livestock, or human structures.
Any organism that reduces the availability, quantity or value of some human resources.

Organisms that have become pests are not limited to any class or phyla. These organisms are varied in
their habits that make them undesirable.

• Insects (the most diverse and numerous of all animals)

• Mites, Nematodes, Mollusks and other invertebrates species
• Vertebrates (rodents and birds)
• Pathogens
• Weeds

Pest problems are most frequently the result of a species papulation and remaining for some reason,
more dense than normal.

Insect Pest -any insect which annoys, injure or damage plant directly or indirectly. Damage/injury may
be in the form of:

• Crop yield reduction

• Quality reduction
• Transmission of disease agent

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Lesson 1. Classification of insects according to the type of food eaten.
Different types of insects eat different types of food. Some insects eat other insects, some feed on
blood, some eat nectar from plants and some insects will even eat stored human food that is not sealed
up. Most insects, however, are herbivores, meaning they eat only plants. Many different types of insects
feed on plants. The different classification of insects according to the type of food eaten are describe
below:
a. Phytophagous – (insect feeding on plants)

• Feeds on any part of the plants by removing tissue from these parts (leaves, stem,
roots, reproductive structure)
• Feed on plant sap from puncture tissue
• Feed on nectar and other plant products
b. Zoophagous- (insect feeding on other animals including almost all vertebrates and
invertebrates
c. Saprophagous – (feeding on non-living organic matter)
• Play important role in cycling of nutrients
• As general scavengers
• As dung feeders
• As dead plants feeders
• As carrion feeders
• As human feeders
d. Omnivores – insect feeding on cross categories e.g. stink bugs feeding on other insect
normally but if food is lacking, may switch to feed on plant tissues.

Lesson 2. Ways how insects damage or destroy crops and plants

Insect become pest when they reach high levels of populations and come in conflict with mans welfare
and interests. Their becoming pest are related mostly thru their feeding and oviposition and behavior.
The type of mouthpart an insect posse determines the damage it inflicts on its host. Insects damage or
destroy crops and plants by:
• Chewing leave, buds, stems, bark or fruit
• Sucking sap from leaves, leave, buds, stems, bark, or fruit
• Boring into leave, buds, stems, bark, or fruit
• Causing cancerous growth (galls) on leaves and stem
• Attacking roots and underground stem
• Carrying another insect and establishing them in a particular place
• Spreading or transmitting organism causing plant diseases (insect vector)

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Lesson 3. Assessment of Pest Status
Many people use the terms "damage" and "injury" interchangeably, but entomologists usually make an
important distinction between them.
• Injury is defined as the physical harm or destruction to a valued commodity caused by the
presence or activities of a pest (e.g., consuming leaves, tunnelling in wood, feeding on blood,
etc.).
• Damage is the monetary value lost to the commodity as a result of injury by the pest (e.g.,
spoilage, reduction in yield, loss of quality, etc.).
Any level of pest infestation causes injury, but not all levels of injury cause damage. Plants often
tolerate small injuries with no apparent damage and sometimes even overcompensate by channelling
more energy or resources into growth terminals or fruiting structures. A low level of injury may not
cause enough damage to justify the time or expense of pest control operations. These sub-economic
losses are simply part of the cost of doing business.
But at some point in the growth phase of a pest population it reaches a point where it begins to cause
enough damage to justify the time and expense of control measures. But how does one know when
this point is reached? (How many boll weevils, for example, does it take to make a cotton farmer hook
up his sprayer?) To a great extent, the answer depends on two fundamental pieces of economic
information:
• A. How much financial loss is the pest causing? and
• B. How much will it cost to control the pest?
A pest outbreak, by definition, occurs whenever the value of "A" is greater than the value
of "B". Actual losses are relatively easy to measure in agricultural or industrial settings because
commodity values are well established by commerce and trade. But losses from household insects,
vectors of human disease, and nuisance pests can be much harder to quantify. In these cases,
estimates of damage are often based on potential loss (from disease, contamination, etc.) rather than on
actual or expected loss.

Economic Injury Level

The break-even point, where "A"="B", is known as the economic injury level. This is the population
density at which the cost to control the pest equals the amount of damage it inflicts (actual or
potential). Below the economic injury level, it is not cost-effective to control the pest population
because the cost of treatment (labor plus materials) would exceed the amount of damage. Above the
economic injury level, however, the cost of control is compensated by an equal or greater reduction in
damage by the pest.

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The economic injury level (EIL) is often expressed mathematically by the formula:

where:
• "C" is the unit cost of controlling the pest (e.g., $20/acre)
• "N" is the number of pests injuring the commodity unit (e.g., 800/acre)
• "V" is the unit value of the commodity (e.g., $500/acre)
• "I" is the percentage of the commodity unit injured (e.g., 10% loss)
For the example given above, the economic injury level would equal 320 insects per acre:

The economic injury level is usually expressed as a number of insects per unit area or per sampling
unit. Occasionally, when the insects themselves are difficult to count or detect, the economic threshold
may be based on a measurement of injury (e.g., leaf area consumed or number of dead plants).

It is important to recognize that the economic injury level is a function of both the cost of pest control and
the value of a commodity or product. Some commodities may be worth so little that it is never worth
saving them from insect injury (my wife feels this way about the books I store in my attic).
The value of other commodities may be so great that any level of infestation is worthy of control (my wife
feels this way about the food she stores in her cupboard). Because of its dependence on both cost and
value, the economic injury level can be calculated only after establishing a value for the damaged
commodity or product. In practice, this is a difficult task because different people have different values.
Economic Thresholds

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The economic injury level is a useful concept because it quantifies the cost/benefit ratio that underlies all
pest control decisions. In practice, however, it is not always necessary or desirable to wait until a
population reaches the economic injury level before initiating control operations. Once it is determined
that a population will reach outbreak status, prompt action can maximize the return on a control
investment. Since there is usually a lag time between the implementation of a control strategy and its
effect on the pest population, it is always desirable to begin control operations before the pest actually
reaches the economic injury level.
Consequently, entomologists define a point below the economic injury level at which a decision is made
to treat or not treat. This decision point is called the economic threshold, or sometimes the action
threshold. It is the decision point for action -- the pest density at which steps are first taken to ensure
that a potential pest population never exceeds its economic injury level. The economic threshold, like
the economic injury level, is usually expressed in units of insect density or in terms of an injury
measurement. The economic threshold is always lower than the economic injury level in order to allow
for sufficient time to enact control measures.
Surveillance of Pest Populations
Effective use of economic thresholds in the management of insect populations depends on accurate
measurements of population density as well as reliable predictions of population growth trends. Since it
is not practical to count all the flies in the barnyard or all the boll weevils in the cotton field,
entomologists depend on sampling strategies to estimate density and distribution. Hundreds of
sampling methods have been devised and entomologists continue to develop and refine their
techniques.
An "ideal" sampling strategy requires minimal effort and gives an accurate and reproducible measure of
the density and/or distribution of an insect population. In practice, such "ideal" methods do not
exist. Every technique is inherently biased in some way. One method may be better than another for a
particular pest or situation, but no sampling process is totally random, objective, and repeatable. The
most widely used techniques, such as sweep nets or bait traps, do not measure absolute density of pest
populations, they are only relative measures (yardsticks, in a sense) that may be used as estimates of

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population density once they are properly "calibrated" through exerimentation and comparison with other
sampling techniques.
Sex pheromone traps, for example, may attract male peachtree borers from several miles
downwind. Without compensating for such immigration, trap catch data would greatly exaggerate the
size of a local moth population. Similarly, sweepnet samples of alfalfa weevils tend to underestimate
the numbers of small larvae in a field (relative to adults and large larvae) because early instars hide
within the plant's terminal growth and are not easily knocked out during sweeping.
Analysis of Sampling Data
Simple, descriptive statistics are essential for interpreting data collected in any replicated sampling
scheme. Regardless of how data is gathered, whether as continuous measurements (e.g., leaf area
consumed), in the form of numerical counts (e.g., number of beetles per plant), as ordinal ratings (e.g.,
on a scale from 1 to 10), or in binomial form (e.g., presence/absence), there is always some degree of
uncertainty about its accuracy. Statisticians call this uncertainty "variance". It arises both
from experimental error (inability to precisely replicate all conditions in each sample) and from
the natural variability that is a characteristic of all biological systems (e.g., the number of leafhoppers
collected in 25 sweeps at dawn may be quite different from a similar sample taken that evening in the
same field). Good sampling strategies are designed to minimize variance in order to give the most
reasonable "estimate" of population size.
The mean, variance, and standard error are the calculations most commonly used to evaluate sampling
results. The mean is simply an arithmetic average of data values. It is one of several ways to describe
a range of numbers. The variance (sum of squared deviations from the mean divided by number of
observations), and the standard error (square root of the variance divided by the mean) are measures of
how far the other data values tend to stray from the mean.
Statistical tools provide a way to find and measure the variance in
many different types of data. Columns A and B (at right) have the Column A Column B
same "average" values (50), but the variance of column A is
obviously much lower than column B. If these numbers represent
51 12
sample data collected from a single population, an estimate of
49 79
population size based on the numbers in column B would be
51 23
regarded with a great deal more skepticism than a similar estimate
48 67
based on the numbers in column A. In general, larger numbers of
50 31
samples provide more trustworthy estimates of population density.
49 47
By knowing the amount of variance in sample data, it is possible to 52 91
calculate a range of values, a confidence interval, that includes
the upper and lower boundaries of our faith in the reliability of the
samples. A 99% confidence interval means that the probability of data falling outside a given range of
values is only 1 in 100. Confidence intervals can be set at any level of certainty, but in practice, most
pest management decisions are based on 95-99% confidence levels. A lower confidence level is
associated with an increased risk of uncertainty in the development or outcome of a pest outbreak. The
farmer's decision to treat or not treat a pest population has to be made with as little risk as possible. If

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the pest population is larger than indicated by sample data, failure to treat could result in total
destruction of a crop. On the other hand, if the population is smaller than indicated by sample data,
money would be wasted by a decision to treat.
Sequential Sampling
Although it is fairly easy to sample for some insects, many pest management systems utilize sampling
protocols that are fairly time consuming and labor intensive. Whenever large numbers of samples are
needed to achieve an adequate level of confidence, it may be possible to use a sequential sampling
system that saves time and effort by concentrating mostly on populations that are closest to the
economic threshold. Sequential sampling systems are relatively new in pest management, but they are
based on well-established rules for determining confidence intervals for sample data.

Unlike regular sampling protocols that require a fixed number of replications (usually 10-100), sequential
sampling systems are designed to evaluate the data at the end of each sampling step. The total
number of samples is variable, depending upon whether the cumulative data falls inside or outside of
predetermined confidence intervals. Relatively few samples would be needed to recognize that a
population is very small (well below the economic threshold) or very large (well above the economic
threshold). But a larger number of samples (higher confidence) would be needed to decide whether an
intermediate population should be treated or not treated.
In most sequential sampling systems, there are three different outcomes possible at the end of each
sampling step:
1. If the cumulative total of pests exceeds an upper threshold value, then conclude that the
population is large enough to warrant control actions. Stop sampling and prepare to enact
control measures.
2. If the cumulative total of pests is beneath a lower threshold value, then conclude that the
population is small and warrants no control actions. Stop sampling (at least for awhile) and
leave the population untreated.
3. If the cumulative total of pests is between the upper and lower threshold values, then no
conclusion is possible yet. Sampling should continue until cumulative values reach the upper
or lower threshold.

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Activities
• Online lecture/discussion
• Activity workbook

Self-Assessment
• Activity workbook
• Online quiz
• Homework

9. References

CLSU. Agriculturist’s Lisensure examination reviewer 2016. Crop Protection Review Module. College of
Agriculture, Central State University, Science City of Muńoz, Nueva Ecija.
John R. Meyer. 2019. General Entomology.
https://projects.ncsu.edu/cals/course/ent425/library/tutorials/index.html

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