›› 2010, Vol. 53 ›› Issue (8): 891-900.

• RESEARCH PAPERS • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Optimization and application of microencapsulated artificial diet for Orius sauteri (Hemiptera: Anthocoridae)

TAN Xiao Ling, WANG Su, LI Xiu Lian, ZHANG Fan   

  • Online:2011-01-29 Published:2010-08-20

Abstract:

Orius sauteri is an important biological control agent and the massive factory production breeding of this agent is the core point in application processing. Based on the original artificial diet prescription, our present experiments promoted the artificial diet model for O. sauteri by microencapsulation technology. We confirmed the influences of sodium alginate, chitosan and the proportion of core material to wall-forming material on the yield rate, embedding rate, moisture rate and sensory evaluation level of microencapsulated artificial diet by orthogonal experiments. The results indicated that the influential order of ingredients to the yield rate successively was the proportion of core material to wall-forming material > sodium alginate > chitosan. The influential order of ingredients to embedding rate, however,  was chitosan > sodium alginate > proportion of core material to wall-forming material. Furthermore, the sodium alginate influenced the moisture rate most and then chitosan. We observed similar tendency in sensory evaluation, and the corresponding optimum prescription was sodium alginate 2.0%, chitosan 0.6% and the proportion of core material to wall-forming material 13. Based on the embedding rate, we set the optimum prescription of microencapsulation as sodium alginate 1.0%, chitosan 0.8% and the proportion of core material to wall-forming material 11, and a diet of this prescription was used to compare the development status between the O. sauteri fed on the optimum artificial microcapsulated ated and CK (fed on Tetranychus cinnabarinus). The results showed that there were significant differences in 1st and 2nd instar developmental duration. O. sauteri female adults showed significantly shorter life span on artificial diet than on CK. However, there was no significant difference in the emergence rate between two treatments. O. sauteri showed significantly lower oviposition duration, fecundity and hatch rate when feeding on artificial diet microcapsules although we did not observe any difference in pre-oviposition period at all. The intensive analysis of artificial diet effects showed that the respiratory quotient of O. sauteri fed on artificial diet was significantly lower than that on CK. However we observed a converse tendency in comparison of average creeping speed.

Key words: Orius sauteri, artificial diet, micro-capsulation, developmental duration, fecundity