Comparative toxicity of conventional and novel acaricides against the vegetable mite Tetranychus neocaledonicus André on brinjal crop

COMPARATIVE TOXICITY OF CONVENTIONAL AND NOVEL ACARICIDES AGAINST THE VEGETABLE MITE

Abstract

Brinjal or eggplant (Solanum melongena L), a native of India is fourth largest vegetable produced in India. Vavilov (1928) considered Indo-Burma region as its centre of Origin. Various forms, shapes and colours of brinjal are found throughout the region showing its genetic variability. It is of much importance in warm countries like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, China, Philippines and Far- East but is also popular in countries like, France, Italy and United States. In India, brinjal occupies an area of 722.1 thousand hectare nearly 7.8 % of total vegetable area with production of 13443.6 thousand metric tonnes contributing 8.3 % of total vegetable production and productivity of 18.6 metric tonnes/ ha (Anonymous, 2013).  Brinjal is prone to attack by about 44 pests (Lal, 1975). Among them, shoot and fruit borer, leafhoppers, stem borer, leaf webber, aphids, whitefly, thrips and the non insect pests like mites especially the spider mites are the main bottle necks in brinjal productivity (Rizvi, 1996). Among the non-insect pests, mites are the notably notorious pests and gaining tremendous importance in recent years owing to their devastating nature and damage potential. Mites are serious pests of plants causing severe losses to economic crops (Gupta, 2003). Basu and Pramanik (1968) ranked red spider mites as a major threat next to fruit and shoot borer. Altogether 23 species of mite pests have been reported on brinjal from different parts of the world (Dhooria and Bindra, 1977).