Sanitation improves stored product insect pest management

Authors: Morrison, William - Rob; Bruce, Alexander; WILKINS, RACHEL - Kansas State University; ALBIN, CHLOE - Kansas State University; Arthur, Franklin

Submitted to: Insects
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 3/12/2019
Publication Date: 3/17/2019
Citation: Morrison III, W.R., Bruce, A.I., Wilkins, R.V., Albin, C.E., Arthur, F.H. 2019. Sanitation improves stored product insect pest management. Insects. 10(3):77. https://doi.org/10.3390/insects10030077.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/insects10030077

Interpretive Summary: Stored product pests result in 10-30% yield losses as commodities travel through the post-harvest supply chain. There are over 100 insects that attacked post-harvest commodities along the way. In the last several decades, there has been widespread industry recognition that sanitation is important for minimizing the abundance and diversity of these insects in and around food facilities. Sanitation can be thought of as eliminating the presence of food debris, spillage, and residue in and around a food facility. However, there has been less appreciation for how sanitation (i.e. presence of food) interacts with a variety of common pest management tactics such as with insecticides, fumigants, natural enemies, cultural control techniques, and pheromone-based technology. We reviewed the available literature on how the presence of food (used as a measure of sanitation) affects a wide variety of pest management tactics. We found that in almost every case, there was a significant multiple-fold decrease in efficacy under poorer sanitation regimes, regardless of food facility type, life stage, or species considered. In particular, the efficacy of fumigation, aerosols, residual treatments, heat treatments, grain chilling/aeration, inert dusts, and biological control decreased by 2.8–31.5-fold in the presence of food compared to when food was absent. The largest mitigation of effectiveness was for chemical control techniques such as residual insecticides and fumigants. Our review suggests that sanitation is not just important to minimizing the number and type of pests, but it also has cascading effects on a large variety of pest management tactics that limits their usefulness. Areas where there are gaps in our knowledge about how sanitation effects integrated pest management tactics includes: behaviorally-based management (mating disruption and attract-and-kill) and pheromone/kairomone-based monitoring. Future work should determine how sanitation affects these tactics, in particular.

Technical Abstract: There is a large suite of insects that attack anthropogenic agricultural goods after harvest. Proper sanitation programs for food facilities are now recognized as the foundation of good integrated pest management (IPM) programs for stored products throughout the post-harvest supply chain. While good sanitation programs are generally thought to reduce the abundance and diversity of insects, there has been less appreciation of the manifold ways that sanitation interacts with a range of other IPM tactics to modulate their efficacy. Here, we review the literature on how the effectiveness of chemical, physical/cultural, biological, and behaviorally-based control tactics varies with changes in sanitation. In addition, we discuss how sanitation may affect ongoing pheromone- and kairomone-based monitoring programs. Where possible, we quantitatively compile and analyze the impact of sanitation on the fold-change in the efficacy of IPM tactics. We found that decreased sanitation negatively affected the efficacy of most tactics examined, with a mean 1.3–17-fold decrease in efficacy under poorer sanitation compared to better sanitation. Sanitation had neutral or mixed impacts on a few tactics as well. Overall, the literature suggests that sanitation should be of the utmost importance for food facility managers concerned about the efficacy of a wide range of management tactics.