2018/10/01 by Rana D. Parshad, Parshad, Rana D., Sureni Wickramsooriya +3
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · #34D05 #92D40 #Agricultural pest management studies #FOS: Biological sciences #Insect and Pesticide Research #Insect-Plant Interactions and Control #Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE) #Primary: 34C11 #Secondary: 92D25
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1810.00727
openalex publication_date 2018/10/01 · openalex created_date 2018/10/05 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Biological control, the use of predators and pathogens to control target pests, is a promising alternative to chemical control. It is hypothesized that the introduced predators efficacy can be boosted by providing them with an additional food source. The current literature \citeSP11 claims that if the additional food is of sufficient constant quantity and quality then pest eradication is possible in finite time. The purpose of the current manuscript is to show that to the contrary, pest eradication is not possible in finite time, for any quantity and quality of constant additional food. However for a density dependent quantity of additional food, we show pest eradication in finite time is indeed possible. Our results have large scale implications for the effective design of biological control methods involving additional food.