Agricultural Entomology: Insects as Pests

The competition between humans and insects has begun since before civilization existed and continues without stopping until now and will continue to occur as long as humans are still on this earth. This can happen because both humans and certain types of insects constantly want the same thing and at the same time.

Insects can become pests actually due to human perception. It is the human who places a type of insect in the category of pests, either permanently or temporally. Humans call some types of insects as pests because humans compete with insects.

●. Definition of pests and concepts of pests

Pests in a broad sense are all forms of disturbance in humans, livestock and plants. The definition of pests in the narrow sense that are related to crop cultivation activities are all animals that damage the plant or the result where this life activity can cause economic losses. The existence of an animal in a crop before causing economic losses in this sense does not include pests. However, their potential as pests will need to be monitored in an activity called monitoring. Broadly speaking, animals that can become pests can be of insects, mites, mice, birds, or large mammals. Maybe in an area the animal becomes a pest, but in other areas it is not necessarily a pest.

There are two different concepts related to insects and pests, namely insect pests and insect pests. Pest insects are a term used to refer to insects that have the potential as pests. These insects have activities that have the potential to cause harm in an agroecosystem, either because their activities directly damage such as herbivorous insects or indirectly such as disease vector insects. While the pests concept of the emergence of pests can be classified into three groups, namely:

a). The existence of a new land clearing process where there is a change in the structure of an ecosystem. This will cause the ecosystem to become unbalanced again, for example a decline or even the destruction of natural enemies so that the population of a type of insect becomes dramatically increased and causes damage. New land clearing for agriculture will usually cause conditions to become unstable. Monoculture planting will potentially lead to the dominance of an organism in the ecosystem.

Monoculture planting will provide a very abundant food source for a type of organism so that the population of these organisms will develop very rapidly while limiting factors such as natural enemies may be very lacking.

b). Introducing new plants to a location. This event allows the occurrence of a pest population explosion if the cultivated plants that carry the plants carry pests but do not carry the natural enemies of these pests. When the plant is cultivated, pests can develop well, but no natural enemies are available so control measures become difficult.

c). Besides that changes in human perception can also determine pest status, one of which can be measured from the economic threshold. Animals can change their status to pests if the population exceeds or is above the economic threshold, or the level of damage they cause is economically harmful.

source of writing: https://yogadpermana.wordpress.com/2012/06/15/entomologi-pertanian-serangga-sebagai-hama/

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             Me @anwars.