Effects of sweet fennel, Foeniculum vulgare var. dulce, essential oil on the microsporidian pathogen Vairimorpha adaliae and its host, the two-spotted lady beetle, Adalia bipunctata L. (Coleoptera: Coccinellidae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The two-spotted lady beetle, Adalia bipunctata L., is commercially available for biological pest control in Europe and North America.It is susceptible to the microsporidium Vairimorpha adaliae, a spore-forming fungal pathogen which prolongs larval development.Sweet fennel essential oil, Foeniculum vulgare var.dulce, is known to have antifungal properties and has been used for the management of both the microsporidium Nosema ceranae in honeybees and the late blight pathogen, Phytophthora infestans, in tomato and potato plants.However, sweet fennel essential oil has not been investigated for the management of V. adaliae in A. bipunctata.In this study, the effects of sweet fennel essential oil on larval development time, larval mortality rate, adult sex ratio, and microsporidian infection (spore counts) in V. adaliae-infected A. bipunctata were examined.Development time, mortality rate, and sex ratio of larvae fed green peach aphids, Myzus persicae, and water did not differ significantly from larvae fed aphids and 10%, 20%, or 30% fennel, respectively.Although spore loads did not differ significantly, heavier infections were observed in increased fennel concentrations with an increase of 12.83%, 61.33%, and 58.24% in the 10%, 20%, and 30%, respectively.This study suggests that fennel essential oil is safe to use on A. bipunctata and may provide additional energy to the host beetle to withstand the effects of the microsporidian pathogen as larval development time was unaffected, despite heavier infections.Understanding the role of plant secondary compounds on pathogens in lady beetles will help to ensure that beneficial insects remain effective biological control predators as an alternative to synthesized pesticides.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".