Journal
BULLETIN OF ENTOMOLOGICAL RESEARCH
Volume 102, Issue 4, Pages 468-476Publisher
CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1017/S0007485311000848
Keywords
source-sink; host preference; Bt cotton; Helicoverpa armigera; natural selection
Categories
Funding
- ARC [DP0988150]
- CSIRO
- Cotton Communities Catchment Cooperative Research Centre [CCC0005]
- Cotton Research and Development Corporation (CRDC) [CSE0002]
- Australian Research Council [DP0988150] Funding Source: Australian Research Council
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Cotton growing landscapes in Australia have been dominated by dual-toxin transgenic Bt varieties since 2004. The cotton crop has thus effectively become a sink for the main target pest, Helicoverpa armigera. Theory predicts that there should be strong selection on female moths to avoid laying on such plants. We assessed oviposition, collected from two cotton-growing regions, by female moths when given a choice of tobacco, cotton and cabbage. Earlier work in the 1980s and 1990s on populations from the same geographic locations indicated these hosts were on average ranked as high, mid and low preference plants, respectively, and that host rankings had a heritable component. In the present study, we found no change in the relative ranking of hosts by females, with most eggs being laid on tobacco, then cotton and least on cabbage. As in earlier work, some females laid most eggs on cotton and aspects of oviposition behaviour had a heritable component. Certainly, cotton is not avoided as a host, and the implications of these finding for managing resistance to Bt cotton are discussed.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available