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on the facebook. it's a battle that's been going on for millenia ever since humans who growing crops for food they've had to battle the pests that devastate their fields and plantations. you know the spring the pests a still long eggs old fat worms but before long they'll be attacking the young sons . were.

we thought we dealt with the problem when chemical pesticides came along but now we know pesticides are not only home for to the environment but also our health. however there's a natural and environmentally friendly weapon against bugs other insects biological pest control involves releasing them into the fields as a sort of living insecticide. a persuasive idea but complicated to put into practice. it isn't easy to pick living organisms against each other in this way yet scientists and farmers all over the world are convinced that this is the best way ahead if we want to make agriculture both healthy and sustainable. insects.

in those days helen was a young and tamala just in nigeria because salva crops were being destroyed by a pest that was rapidly spreading throughout west africa the food supply was coming under increasing threat. the idea was ok so where does it come from what is in your best people tried to spray this thing and nothing happened because very difficult to kill it with insect insecticide because it has a coating walk sea surface which basically protected from foremost anything i came in there and said ask me ok well what would you do about. him and his team found a parasitic wasp to kill the pest. they farmed thousands of them and released them into the kosov or fields to destroy the pest it was a complete success. as we received it away we could not believe our eyes are these

things as we deploying and going and going so he got established permanently and you know thirty five years after the first release is still there doing his job. the un estimates the program prevented twenty million people from falling into poverty. we know that biological control is actually one of the best way of dealing with best insects. biological pest control protecting fields and orchards using natural processes it means selecting breeding and releasing the right predators to fight pests it keeps the soil air and water chemical free and promotes harmony between people and the soil that feeds them.

biological pest control is based on using the pests natural predators. existing natural enmities and rivalries are exploited. you. over the course of evolution animals have found many ways of killing each other biological pest control takes advantage of the predatory instinct. i'm a useful beetle i'll be released in vineyards where i can eat my favorite insect the meaty bug which sucks the sap out of leaves. i'm a beneficial wasp i unfold my effect through parasitic attack i lay my eggs in my

enemies body my young grow them by slowly killing the host. i am a microscopic name a toad a bacterium or a virus i'm used in bio pesticide solutions i in fact my favorite past with the disease. one company working in biological pest control below talk is currently looking for predators that could be deployed to fight a vine past. like

their distant relatives from brazil european trick or gramma wasps are being bred here. in britain we're trying to pick just the females there the beneficial ones because they lay the eggs. i make a pre-selection with the naked eye and then i check that under microscope. different strains of wasp undergo a number of tests. the scientists want to pick the strain that is most threatening to the past but doesn't also attack other insects that's the big challenge. here we have a pest that attacks the flowers in the grape vine the european great by moth. next to it we have its natural predator the trick of grama this parasitic wasp. they lay their eggs in the eggs of the grapevine moth the grapevine moth has laid

its eggs on the walls of this tube here i have tubes with trick a gram of females. that i'm going to bring the two together and then i close the container off for twenty four hours. get up. we'll the wasp lay eggs and how many or even none we enter the research centers in a sanctum to find out what exactly is going on in this test tube. in this sealed off room there are test tubes that contain more than seven hundred different strains of trick programa wasps this is the breeding site the insect population that the scientists drawn to find new biological warriors. these wasp

strains all differ through tiny genetic variations but that could be crucial in the fight against a past. biological diversity is the basis of biological pest control. twenty four hours later the scientists have to count how many eggs in every test tube were attacked by the females of different strains. complied too. much. sometimes they can't find the perfect insect for a particular pest but the results pool is immense there are thousands of natural predators that would be perfect for the job just waiting to be discovered.

this isn't just a twenty first century approach a text more than two thousand years old proves that natural pest control was being used in china even back then. and to protect tangerine groves. charles riley was seen as the pioneer of science based biological pest control in the late nineteenth century the brilliant and tamala just thought he could import a bug from australia to exterminate a pest in california in citrus plantations. the idea was successful. the use of beneficial insects in agriculture spread around the world it was the golden age of biological pest control. then he came to

a standstill. in the 1940's chemical pesticides conquered the fields being easy to apply and extremely effective they were favored over biological methods. agro chemicals triumphed around the world it wasn't until the one nine hundred sixty s. that research into biological pest control started up again. in the shadow of the pesticide beneficial insects slowly started going back into battle. players that are no more than a million want to know it took a few years but french greenhouses now three dominantly use insects to fight purses

for tomatoes but increasingly for flowers to a few dozen species are used on the largest open spaces largely trickle grama from a scrubs for example on an area of almost one hundred and twenty thousand hectares is what i mean he's wanted to use your clips on you nick to. biological pest control needs to be researched and developed further chemical pest control is coming to the end of its useful life span because of increased resistance in its targets. and worse the growth of the human population and the increasing expansion of agricultural areas have resulted in new pests. natural landscapes are raised to the ground insects that used to feed on wild plants live and reproducing crops instead. scientists are trying to understand this adapting

mechanism pests aren't necessarily born that way. that we live in a time where many wild plant populations are being replaced by crops what threat to the insects that previously settled in wild populations pose for crops your kids there are no under team want to know whether some wild insect populations are genetically predisposed to become pests. the scientists are looking at a month from africa the west african pink bora. it's caterpillar attacks many cereal crops milledge in africa and maize in france. i was with the sugarcane burra this one also bores into the crop i'm lives in a stall where you yeah this is the hole they make we can see very clearly here that

the caterpillar has completely hollowed out the star of what. we just see it's excretions that. we are interested in the west african paint borer because of the mechanisms to determine whether an insect will attack a crop or not gone. in east africa we have says a mere moths that keep to wild plants even though mazes grown near by i look but in mediterranean countries large populations of this moth attacked millet and males. be it a pink burra from france or from kenya the method is the same but the french caterpillar has switched to found maize whereas the african one is stuck with its original food source wild mice.

the scientists studying the dietary behavior of the two say salmiya populations. at the same time they want to understand the genetic variations that predispose an insect to becoming a pest. they've identified a foraging gene that they believe is significantly involved in this development however it's also being discovered that is very difficult for an insect to adapt to crops. only a few species can flourish on agricultural land of one hundred fifty different species in boris in africa only four percent are pests for cereal crops however very large populations can develop in fields and they've spoken.

while species become pests pests develop resistances and to make matters worse animals are moved back and forth around the world thanks to a rapidly growing economy. every year around thirty species that have accidentally come to europe managed to settle here permanently it's thought that one to three of these plants and animal species will threaten crop production and biodiversity long term. but any thoughts is a scientist at the european biological control a bar

a tree which is part of the united states department of agriculture it's his job to find an insect that can curb the spread of a particular plant in the u.s. part of his research takes place in the herbarium of the natural history museum in paris because the plant originates from europe. we have a new sample so what do they have here time to have a look. at the specimen. plant for friends. while grass now covers millions of hank tears of american prairie it's a plague to livestock farmers because it's poisonous to cattle. what i surveyed my work is i have to travel to the areas of origin and compile a capsule oak of natural predators. they could be insects mites or things like funky viruses or bacteria the question is how do they all live together we

want to release one of these biological predators in north america to curb the spread of this invasive plant that has become established there. and start the mcguire conduct biological pest control through a climatized nation it's laborious finicky work where the introduced beneficial insects have to exterminate the past in the new environment without affecting the local flora and fauna. three months later the scientists try to find the invasive plant in the landscape it originates from. the irony is that this wire grass inventor not to do which is overwhelming the american prairie is very rare in

europe in fact it's endangered. the pair are accompanied by a german botanist who knows where the plant grows. i gather. there are lots of them a this is one for example. why i grows. the grains are well developed we can harvest in germany. so i'm collecting the thought that surrounding the route because you want to know what kinds of condition of internet lakes to grow in you hope to also understand if there may be some microorganisms in the soil. that facility or inhibit the growth of the internet or so perhaps the understanding within the soil can give us clues

as to why it's so rare in your mind in north america. in a few years time an insect or fungus from europe could be introduced to the united states to curb the spread of wild grass and then the american cattle will have good feet again but until that day comes the scientists have to carry on. introducing an exotic species to a country isn't necessarily harmless biological pest control has had some setbacks . in the one nine hundred eighty s. an incentive to fight a foods was imported into the us the harlequin ladybird. the larva of this beetle which differs greatly from the adult insect is

a hungry predator which makes it useful. but it wasn't long before the worst happened the ladybirds menu was much bigger than expected native beetle species were attacked and eaten putting them at risk of extinction some beneficial predators armed to specialized as scientists claim. here in lies the weak spot of the ecologists dreams. harlequin ladybird originates from china you know it was released in quebec in the us and in france and it can still be found in england and belgium. this insect was introduced as a beneficial predator but it rapidly developed into a past which no one predicted. the beetle has invaded the humans and it

swarms we now want to curtail it it must be used for biological past control. the disastrous introduction of the harlequin ladybird gave biological pest control a bad reputation for a long time when you do find an insect somewhere you go to our core and in process you identify make sure that you know what it is you make sure that what is feed on what it is reproduction and what it is like and not like so basically you do all this research and if you do that research well you do minimize the chance of something going wrong. introducing an insect into an environment is always a calculated risk but isn't the damage that's caused by pesticides more important. one hundred and twenty years worth of data shows that ninety nine percent of

programs for biological pest control have been ineffective or worst at least thomas . i'm a useful have a fly i'm effective and harmless i eat a foods that attack apple trees. and aircraft spraying insecticides no it's being used for biological pest control

releasing four hundred thousand track a gram eggs perfect air intensively farmed crops and now treated with biological pest control everywhere around the world. four million hectares of sugarcane fields in brazil are treated with a trick a gram a wasp which is actually native to the country so it can be bred according to need . cheryl if your house is responsible for seven thousand hectares of sugar cane which is also used to make the biofuel ethanol biological pest control requires special vigilance the number of pests on the fields has to be monitored all the time.

traps are set as soon as the number of borers crosses a particular threshold that indicates a new infestation the defensive predators and released. this happens three or four times a year and can be done by hand the workers apply the little cards filled with the wasp eggs. intensively farmed monocultures always have to start biological pest control from scratch because it's not possible to create a stable equilibrium between the pest population and the predators although as us was by those it all the wasps attack the us a short while later they hatch and multiply until there are no more pest eggs in the field. the

small predatory wasps and released onto huge fields their sphere of action is so small that they quickly run out of eggs in which they could multiply further most of them die the mobile sugarcane boar on the other hand has no problem flying from field to field in this landscape of endless sugarcane fields there are always sugarcane burra population somewhere just waiting for the next opportunity to attack. when the sugarcane burra returns the starting population of the parasitic wasp is too small to protect the plantation effectively and that's why we breathe this parasite in the lab and send it to farmers in large quantities they can then deploy it at the right time and in the correct goals to combat the past effectively.

these are the eggs that are applied in the fields. every gram of the pound it contains thirty six thousand eggs. a clever trick makes the mass production of these ready to use wasps possible. normally the trick of grandma has to attack the egg of a sugarcane boar as a parasite in order to multiply but the deception is effective here it's presented with the eggs of a different past those of the conventional flower mouth which is very easy to breed it's a successful trick. that's

why billions of flower moths have to be bred every week. i'm going to think. the biggest challenge for us and the lab is the production of the flowers. we breed cap's of the lives that will become flower moths in these books. one box like this contains around six thousand fully grown caterpillars we produce ten thousand of these boxes every week. ten thousand boxes six kilograms of insect eggs are produced every week the venerable ecological approach is a little lost in this form of intensive breeding. but the release of the parasitic wasp's is definitely preferable to the use of chemical

pesticides thanks to the use of this small parasite the efficacy of biological pest control is reaching new heights. in law case there are no laws lab where back with the west african ping bora which is well hidden in the stalk the scientists has started a new study into this moth which in africa is attacked by a parasitic wasp but unlike the small trick a grammar the coty's or wasp carries a virus that only affects the west african pink burra a virus specialized in just one past is exciting to scientists they want to discover the modus operandi of this virus which makes it possible for the co t.-z. a wasp to raise its young in the body of the says army a caterpillar. and

back to this special feature of the coty's ear is that it already lays eggs as a caterpillar. i'm going to place the parasitic female near the says and me it had a pill. it has a sting with which it can insert its eggs into the caterpillar and it's laying eggs now. and. when. the caterpillar tries to get free but it's too late. the parasitic wasp has domesticated a virus the female produces a virus particles that are inserted into the caterpillar along with the eggs this virus then shuts down the caterpillars immune response. the wasp wants to keep the caterpillar alive but without an immune response the

virus blocks the immune system of the says army or so that the eggs of the coke can develop without any problems in the caterpillar the la vie then gradually eat the caterpillar from the inside this is i mean a caterpillar only stays alive for two weeks that's exactly how long it takes the wasp la vie to hatch. it's now down to scientists to decipher the clever parasitic behavior exhibited by the could the destructive inventive spectrum of these animals must be imitated or outdone in biological pest control strategies of the future. this is a conflict moth its caterpillar bores its way into the flesh of young apples at the start of summer.

codling moth can destroy eighty percent of the trees in an orchard. and. scientists developed a hugely effective biological pesticide in the battle against this past but because it was used excessively the inevitable happened the codling moth developed resistances it would appear that biological pest control suffers from the same problems as its chemical counterpart. miriam vance works in a lab that monitors the resistances of insects to chemical and biological substances in the whole of france codling moth regularly find their way to her lab desk. lashawn candle i'm feeding cattle in an awful lot by

with the granulomas is virus this virus is used as a biological pesticide to fight pests and orchards a few of the pests have developed resistances to the virus we're trying to find out whether these insects are among them or not all. in focus as soon as the virus is in the law by it infects their digestive tract and causes a disease. that. the lab studies the physiological processes of the codling moth resistance to the ground you loss' virus. the virus takes around six days to kill an infected caterpillar the caterpillar loses weight turns white and ultimately liquefies from within.

getting resistant pests only the early phase of the infection takes place. the virus manages to get into the intestinal cells but it can't multiply there it is if the virus and the resistant pest were incompatible at the cellular level. so far the scientists haven't found out what cellular mechanisms in the codling moth caterpillar block the viral replication process. but they do know that they're dealing with a new particularly effective form of resistance in six true survivalists.

the formation of resistances doesn't necessarily mean biological pesticides don't work they still leave no trace and are harmless to humans however many resistant pests are a warning to us to give up a form of agriculture that is highly dependent on any pesticides. when we presented to a show degree culture we said that we need to change the paradigm so the paradigm change was actually meant to be going away from a large scale monochrome up. as always you know we need to change this so we need an agriculture which is close to nature. because of the problems associated with massive use of pesticides several states in

india have changed course and they're now using biological pest control a third of the agricultural land in telangana is gradually abandoning the use of chemical pesticides. in hyderabad the state capital the center for sustainable agriculture supports farmers who want to switch. and another new form of biological pest control is being developed in india through conservation this method aims at an ecological transition so that the natural predators of pests find favorable living conditions on the agricultural land that way a lasting equity librium between pest and predator populations can be created predators aren't released anymore no beetles no wasps not hundreds and not billions they live peacefully on the fields all year round.

chandrasekhar on your darva ready from the center for sustainable agriculture monitor how the insects live together in the fields they're teeming with life which is very beneficial for the farmers. here if they're for whatever that is here we have our little moth eggs with. can you see the larvae they eat leaves twenty years for that which is what is seeing usually on cotton tomato and peanut plants. they have natural predators too and. here we have commonly swings these are their eggs.

these eggs of the common lace wing applied like guard posts are just waiting to happen and do battle with the moths. in the ground there are worms preparing to attack snails and slugs and flesh eating spiders are thrilled to suck plant eating insects dry. these fields are part of an agricultural system that combines different forms of cultivation with hedges bush is in meadows reserved for wild plants it's a haven for wild plant and animal species that provides protection and resistance. dynamic fields healthy plants what works in india could be implemented everywhere more than seventy five percent of all agricultural businesses in the world work

like the ones in india they are family run businesses with small growing areas. pest control through a climatized nation through multiplication and through conservation. these different forms of biological pest control could change agriculture from the ground up as it were in this new kind of agriculture chemicals would be a last resort. there's mounting pressure many lobby groups and the public are ensuring that we focus more and more on natural voles of pest control to biological pest control is the best way to do what it requires a new approach and a new way of seeing things but it can be done i say that as a scientist but it's also doable as a society and as a political decision pretty quick as possible and it will happen. only

around five percent of agricultural land is currently protected by biological means but the tiny beneficial predator is showing us how it's done what are we waiting for. a parasitic wasp a bug a virus a beetle and on the future of humanity. street art is entering the museum. berlin's new urban nation museum is the first of its

kind. shows the work of international stars and newcomers alike and we were there at the grand opening of the urban nation the venue for urban contemporary art. lomax thirteen dublin. crime fighters the new season of radio crime thrillers begins. in. motion domestic violence cyber crime and to him and trafficking for investigative cases that will keep you on your toes at crime fighters series at the base idea so every young person needs to listen to crime fighter and share tell a friend tell a friend to a friend crime fighters don't miss it. has tagged germany decides what

is your take on the whole position regarding not only climate change. what do you want to know about germany's general election. you put it to q. and they're going to. ask w. your questions about germany. and america get a what not a pundit. write to us on facebook we'll answer your questions. you're watching the news live from berlin mian mars' aung san suu kyi she breaks her silence on the ranger refugee crisis she condemns the violence but human rights

groups say she is bury her head in the sand about what the u.n. calls ethnic cleansing.