Migrant Pests: Problems and Potentialities - Tapa dura

Reseña del editor

This meeting was planned by the late R.C.Rainey, FRS as a sequel to the 1977 Royal Society discussion of "Strategy and Tactics of Control of Migrant Pests", to review the problems of monitoring and control still posed by locusts, grasshoppers, moths and blackfly in the light of progress made since that time and the potentialities of new methods afforded by recent technological advances. Trials in which moth migration was monitored directly by airborn insect-detecting radar were reported and the potential application of the method to other insects considered. For indirect monitoring, there have been major advances in remote sensing for observing weather systems and for monitoring the seasonal and erratic rainfall upon which so many of these pests are dependent for survival. Perhaps the most encouraging success has been achieved in the World Health Organization's campaign against the blackfly vectors of Onchocerciasis, river blindness, now conducted far more widely than across the seven countries originally targeted. More dramatic, and more salutary, have been the upsurges in recent years of locusts and grasshoppers, particularly in Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, to numbers rarely exceeded hitherto, and with trans-Atlantic migration by the Desert Locust on a scale never previously recorded. This meeting provided a forum for open exchange of current information and opinions on the problems, potentialities and progress in the battle against migrant pests.