Abstract
Artificial lighting, including light-emitting diode (LED) illumination, is increasingly being optimized in protected agricultural systems to maximize plant yield and quality. However, it may also cause other top–down and bottom–up effects in these relatively simple ecological communities that also include insect pests and their natural enemies. While some effects of LED lighting on insects have been demonstrated to date, it is not known how they influence biological control of insect pests in practice. To examine potential top–down and bottom–up impacts of LED illumination on greenhouse biological control with parasitoids, we studied the effects of artificially lengthened days on a tri-trophic system in cages and in a greenhouse. We grew plants under a 12-h photoperiod of white-supplemented light with 6 h of additional (1) white light or (2) red and blue light, or (3) with no additional light. We exposed the plants to the pest aphid Myzus persicae (Hemiptera: Aphididae) with or without its parasitoid wasp Aphidius matricariae (Hymenoptera: Braconidae), or to no insects. The 18-h light treatments increased mean plant dry mass by 127% compared with the 12-h control without affecting the aphid’s population density or the parasitoid’s biological control efficacy, under relatively low light conditions. This suggests that insect communities in protected agriculture can be resilient to even drastic changes in their light environment, and that adjusting crop lighting in a manner that affects plant growth does not necessarily compromise biological control’s effectiveness.
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Data availability
The datasets generated during and analysed during the current study are available in the Figshare repository, https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.22299847
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Jason Thiessen for experimental setup and data collection; Clarissa Capko for data collection; Warren Wong for feedback on the experimental design; Yonathan Uriel for insect rearing methods; and Ricardo Sarte, Paige Boegarts, Denika Joiner, and Autumn White for greenhouse support.
Funding
This work was supported by the Organic Science Cluster 3 on organic farming from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in partnership with L’Abri végétal, PremierTech and Inno-3B (grant OSC3-Activity 13) and a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Graduate Master’s Scholarship.
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JF, PA, and MD conceived and designed the research. JF and PA conducted experiments. JF and PA analysed data. JF wrote the manuscript. JF, PA, and MD revised the manuscript. All authors read and approved the manuscript.
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Fraser, J.L., Abram, P.K. & Dorais, M. Supplemental LED lighting improves plant growth without impeding biological control of aphids with parasitoids in a tri-trophic greenhouse system. J Pest Sci (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10340-023-01703-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10340-023-01703-8