The Two-Spotted Spider Mite (TSSM, Tetranychus urticae, Trombidiformes: Tetranychidae) is an economically important pest in Israel and worldwide, primarily in field crops such as vegetables and cut flowers, but also in fruit trees, cannabis and other plant species. TSSM is becoming more widespread, its outbreaks are becoming more common, and it is becoming a primary pest in crops in which it was previously considered a minor pest in the past, all this as temperatures rise in more and more areas in the world.
Research in my group is aimed at studying different aspects of the effects of heat on TSSM; we study the effect of heat on adult females and their pesticide resistance abilities, and we compare the reaction of different plant lines to TSSM when grown at different temperatures in the lab. Finally, we conduct field experiments to examine the effectiveness of different chemical pesticides on different plant variants at different temperature regimes at controlling TSSM populations in the field.
Our studies have shown that exposures at different lengths, to different heat stresses, induce different responses of TSSM to both plants and pesticides.
The data we have produced demonstrates the difficulty in predicting the effect hot climate will have on plant-mite interactions.
