Major Insects of Wheat: Biology and Mitigation Strategies

Wheat is one of the major cereal crops with annual global production over 600 MT from about 200 M hectares (FAO 2012). The cultivation of wheat started about 10,000 years ago as part of the Neolithic revolution which state a transition from hunting and gathering of food to settle agriculture. Earlier cultivated forms of wheat were diploid (einkorn) and tetraploid (emmer) with known initial origin of the south-eastern part of Turkey (Dubcovsky and Dvorak, 2007). Subsequent evolutionary adaptation and continuous research produced hexaploid bread wheat that is currently widely adapted in about 95% area of world wheat. Globally, all crop production practices are being highly challeged by biotic and abiotic stresses. Biotic stresses especially insect pests and dieseases causes devastating damage in terms of yield and quality. On average pests cause 20-37% yield losses woldwide which translating to approximately $70 billion annually (Pimentel et al., 1997). In agro-ecosystems, herbivore insects are abudant and likely to colonise within same population and disperse from one crop field to another de‐ pending on the availablility of plant tissues and feeding behaviour of insects. Quantitative feeding style of the herbivore insect on specific crop resulting significant damage to the crop during the entire life cyle which is believed specific insect as pest of that perticular crop. Single pest may attack multiple crops within single growing season that make crop rotation and pest management more challenged. Wheat producing areas encounter with either sucking and pericing pests or plant tissue feeding pests. Regional pests also observed in wheat growing areas as major damaging pests woldwide. The breeding strategy againsts these insects/pests heavily rely on the inheritance of resistance mechanism in the crops under consideration. The insect resitance is mainly goverened by three types of mechanisms/genes i.e., oligogenes; where resistance is confered by single genes as in case of hessian fly in wheat, polygenes; where