Speaker
Description
Drosophila suzukii is a fruit fly species native to South-East Asia that has become a major invasive pest in Europe and North America. Thanks to its serrated ovipositor, which allows it to lay eggs in healthy fruit, it causes significant damage to several soft fruit crops such as strawberries, blueberries, and cherries. As pesticide use alone is environmentally costly and increasingly inefficient, it is necessary to consider alternative control strategies. In this context, the sterile insect technique – the release of sterilised males that compete with wild males for mating – constitutes a promising and ecologically sustainable method that can be used alone or combined with other pest-management tools.
In this talk, focusing on cherry orchards, we present a stage-structured population dynamics model based on the physiological characteristics of D. suzukii. Development time, fecundity and adult survival are modelled as functions of temperature in order to explicitly account for seasonality. The model also accounts for the spatial configuration of cherry orchards and wild resource patches, and population movement between them.
This model is used to explore optimal release strategies: given a certain number of males released during the year, is it better to target spring or fall populations? What is the optimal frequency of releases? Where should sterile males be released when there are multiple orchards and wild plots?
