CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

In Argentina the cultivated area is around 30.524.814 ha, where 620.000 ha are covered with horticultural crops. The ?Cinturón Hortícola Platense? is one of the most important horticultural area of country with more than 7500 ha.The pests control is done by chemical control using broad-spectrum pesticides mainly due to the use of natural enemies is incipient yet. However, there are several native natural enemies associated to horticultural pests. Regarding to predators, crysopids and coccinellids are the most relevant in these agroecosystems according to their relative abundance, where they are associated to sucking pests. Nevertheless, the abusive use of insecticides, most of them broad spectrum ones could put in risk the conservation of these natural enemies there, reducing their survival and conditioned their role as biological control agents.In this framework, our studies in the last ten years have been focused in the evaluation of the short and long term effects of pesticides on native natural enemies such as Chrysopidae and Coccinellidae predators to categorize the selectivity of most important insecticides used or not registered yet in Argentina. The objetive of the present work was to evaluate the side effects of neonicotinoids, pyrethroids, organoclorine, IGRs, botanical and novel products on the development stages of the different species of both predators families.The two species of Chrysopidae evaluated were less susceptible to insecticides than Coccinellidae ones irrespective of the insecticide group considered, but they were more susceptible to neonicotinoids. On the other hand, IGRs and botanical insecticides showed low acute toxicity (mortality) but several long-term effects (development time, fecundity and fertility) and teratological effects were observed also.The toxicity of different compunds and inclusion of them in IPM programs where the biological control by conservation is required, are discussed