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Caterpillar cloud on tomatoes -GS Mudur
-The Telegraph

New Delhi: Government scientists have called for nationwide surveillance to look for a caterpillar native to South America that has slipped into at least four Indian states and could threaten the country's tomato growers and the ketchup-and-puree industries.

The scientists at the National Bureau of Agricultural Insect Resources (NBAIR), Bangalore, worried about the pest's spread, have also initiated efforts to get wasps and predatory bugs to serve as its natural enemies and design long-lasting sex traps to suppress its population.

The pest, Tuta absoluta, emerging from Peru's Andean region, reached Spain in 2006, then spread to France, Italy, and Greece, jumped across the Mediterranean into northern Africa, moved into eastern Africa and the Middle-East before it was spotted in Maharashtra in 2014.

Since then, scientists have observed the pest - also called the tomato pinworm or leafminer - on farms across Gujarat, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu where they have caused slight to extreme damage, even in fields where farmers had sprayed pesticides.

"It is unclear why this is so. It is possible the pest is resistant to the specific pesticides that were sprayed, or the pesticides may have killed predators that could have been natural enemies of this pest," Chandish Ballal, a senior entomologist at the NBAIR, told The Telegraph.

Ballal and her colleagues have called for intensive surveillance efforts to look for this pest in major tomato-growing states such as Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Bengal, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu. Although the pest prefers tomatoes, scientists have seen it feed on potatoes and eggplants (brinjals) in other countries.

Tomato farmers across the country and the ketchup, sauce, and puree industries may face a serious threat if this pest is not controlled, the NBAIR researchers have warned in a paper published on Sunday in Current Science, a journal published by the Indian Academy of Sciences.

The pinworm's rapid spread has caused concern among crop scientists across the world. Last year, plant protection scientists and policy-makers met in Berlin, Germany, and decided to intensify quarantine measures and explore the effectiveness of using natural predators against the pest.

"When the tomato leafminer invades a country, it can cause between 80 and 100 per cent crop losses unless farmers and countries are ready with counter-measures," said Rangaswamy Muniappan, an entomologist and director of the integrated pest management innovation laboratory at Virginia Tech in the US.

"The pest can move in multiple ways - the moth itself is tiny and can move only from farm to farm, but commercial transport of tomatoes can take the pest from one part of the country into another, and it probably crosses borders and oceans through tomato exports or nursery seedlings," Muniappan said.

The NBAIR scientists have spent the past year looking for other insects that might serve as natural enemies against the South American pest. Their studies suggest that two wasps, Tricogramma Presiotum and Trichogramma Achaea , may serve as promising biological predators to curb pinworm populations.

Another entomologist, Kesavan Subaharan of the NBAIR, is trying to develop a controlled-release trap based on pheromones - chemicals secreted by female moths of Tuta absoluta that attract the male moths. The traps are intended to lure and capture adult male moths and disrupt the reproductive cycle.

"Pheromone traps are a proven technology when the males are trapped, the females have no one to mate with, they can't lay eggs, the population is suppressed," said Subaharan, who leads a team that has developed a technology to keep a pheromone trap active on a farm for up to 45 days.

The insect has not been reported from the US yet but the country's government agricultural officials are also concerned.

"Our domestic tomato industry could be severely affected," Devaiah Muruvanda, a senior risk manager for the US agriculture department, had said in a media release issued by Virginia Tech last year. "The United States is taking it so seriously we haven't even given permits to do research (in laboratories) in order to prevent any possibility of the insect's escape (from the labs into farms)."