Beneficial natural enemies of rice plants

(Baonghean.vn) -In the fields, in addition to pests that harm rice, there are also beneficial natural enemies that destroy and parasitize pests, limiting their harmful effects.

Insects eat pests, but they become food for other insects. People call those who attack pests on rice plants natural enemies... And spraying too much pesticides to prevent pests has led to the destruction of many beneficial natural enemies in controlling pests on rice.

Below are some beneficial natural enemies for farmers to refer to and have methods to protect them.

Dwarf spider

Adult spiders have three pairs of dots on their backs. They prefer to live in flooded rice fields and spin webbing at the base of rice plants above the water surface. Spiders move slowly and prey mainly by getting caught in webbing.

Long legged spider

Long-legged spiders have long bodies and legs and usually live on rice leaves. Long-legged spiders prefer moist areas. They hide in rice stalks at noon and hunt for prey in webs in the morning. Long-legged spiders build circular webs but they are very weak.

Web spider

Brightly colored and round netting under the rice canopy. Females have yellow and gray-white stripes on their bellies. Males are smaller and reddish-brown. During hot days, males and females seek shelter under leaves next to the netting. When the sky is cloudy, females wait for prey among the leaves while males wait nearby.

3-chambered beetle

The three-chambered beetle is an active hard-bodied insect. The larvae are shiny black, the adults are reddish brown. The beetle often lives in and attacks leaf roller nests.

Green blind stink bug

It is a small stink bug with stripes on its back that is common in rice fields. The broad-shouldered adult may or may not have wings. The wingless type lacks the black and white stripes on its neck and forewings. Its small body and single-segmented forelegs make it distinguishable from other stink bugs. Natural enemy of planthoppers.

Water bug

An aquatic insect, commonly found in watery areas. The adult is light green, larger than the carnivorous water bug, but less numerous. Adults come in two forms: winged and wingless. The natural enemies of stem borers, planthoppers, are concentrated on the banks of rice fields.

Red ladybug

Ladybugs are oval-shaped and light or bright red in color. They are active during the day, on the tops of rice plants, feeding on planthoppers, larvae and eggs.

Pincer-tailed beetle

The characteristic of the pincer beetle is that it has a pair of pincer-shaped hind legs used for self-defense. The pincer beetle is shiny black, with a white space between the abdominal segments and a white spot at the tip of the antenna. They often live in dry fields and nest underground at the base of rice plants. This species of beetle crawls into the grooves that stem borers have made to look for larvae. Sometimes they climb onto leaves to look for leaf rollers.

Blue bee

Egg parasites of rice stem borers play an extremely important role in reducing stem borer density in rice fields. Egg parasites of rice stem borers are very small wasps, about the size of a grain of sand, they easily kill over 70% of stem borer eggs in the field.

Each female wasp searches each rice plant for stem borer egg nests and lays her tiny eggs inside. The parasitized stem borer eggs are destroyed by the wasps developing inside.

Gray fly

The gray fly has white stripes, is larger than the house fly, has a hairy body (thorns), and a large head. When rice fields are attacked by large leaf rollers, they often appear, find and land on the back of the host, the large leaf roller. The eggs hatch into maggots and eat the flesh inside the host. After eating, they crawl out to make cocoons on the rice leaves and turn into pupae.

About 4 days later, the pupae hatch into flies, bite the cocoon, come out, mate again and find a new host to start the next life cycle. Just like that, the gray flies limit the density of large leaf rollers.

Damselfly

This is a narrow-winged dragonfly, weaker than other dragonflies of its family. The adult is blue and black, with a small, long abdomen. The male is more beautiful in color than the female. The tail of the male's abdomen is orange-yellow (blue). The female's body is green. The natural enemy of aphids, leaf rollers, etc.

Spoonbill

Moths are large insects with a slanted face and very long antennae, often twice as long as their bodies, making them easily distinguishable from common grasshoppers. Moths are green, and adults are green and yellow. They are often active at night and are found in abundance in rice fields. They are natural enemies of stink bugs, stem borers, leafhoppers and stemhoppers.

Fire ants

Fire ants have a painful sting, are reddish brown in colour and nest in dry fields or on the banks of wet rice fields. Natural enemies of many insects.

Cricket

Crickets with pointed tails occur in moist and dry soil environments and will jump from tree to tree when disturbed. Most adults lose their wings after being in rice fields. Juvenile crickets have clipped wings; adults are black and juveniles are pale with brown stripes.

Jumping crickets eat eggs of black-headed five-lined stem borers, leaf rollers, cutworms, leaf miners, and larvae of leafhoppers and stemhoppers.

» Efforts to control the epidemic and save rice

Ngoc Anh

(Synthetic)