Invertebrates

Many of our current pest control strategies have unintended and detrimental effects on the surrounding environment. For example, heavy reliance on pesticides can result in non-target kill of native or beneficial invertebrates.

We need new tools to effectively control pests while avoiding these unwanted side-effects.

The ‘Novel Tools & Strategies – Invertebrates’ team aimed to develop a new, landscape scale, invertebrate pest management tool by 2024.

While working towards this goal, they partnered with iwi and hapū to understand how new pest control tools and enhance kaitiakitanga and promote tino rangatiratanga.

• A survey of key stakeholders in April and May 2020 showed that most people wanted invertebrate eradication research to focus on wasps – particularly those from the Vespula
• The same survey showed the honeybee pest mite Varroa is a valuable research target, because of its huge negative impact on the honey industry and other industries that rely on pollinators.
• Four PhD students have started research into:
  • How gene silencing could be used to control the parasitic Varroa
  • Next generation Varroa
  • How gene drives might be used for Polistes wasp control.
  • How gene editing might be used for German wasp control.
• Dr Sara Moylan and Dr Ocean Mercier supervised five summer interns between Victoria University of Wellington and Worcester Polytech Institute, USA. The interns conducted user tests and evaluations of ESAT, an ecological management tool.

This work built on previous BioHeritage research into wasp eradication.