Legal requirements and consumer demands for residue-free products pose a big challenge for pest control in grain stores. One possible alternative to chemical insecticides is biological pest control with the pteromalid wasp Lariophagus distinguendus against the weevils Sitophilus granarius, S. oryzae (Coleoptera: Dryophtoridae), and many other storage pest beetles. The use of this wasp as a bioc...

Cell physiology in the weevil Sitophilus oryzae is coordinated by three integrated genomes: nuclear, mitochondrial, and the "S. oryzae principal endosymbiont" (SOPE). SOPE, a cytoplasmic bacterium (2 x 10(3) bacteria per specialized bacteriocyte cell and 3 x 10(6) bacteria per weevil) that belongs to the proteobacteria gamma3-subgroup, is present in all weevils studied. We discovered a fourth p...

An automatic recognition algorithm was developed and tested for detection of certain defects or contaminants in X-ray images of agricultural commodities. Testing of the algorithm on wheat kernels infested with larvae of the granary weevil, Sitophilus granarius (L.) yielded comparable results to those obtained by human subjects evaluating digitized X-ray film images (14.4% overall error vs. 15.6...

Sitophilus oryzae (L.), S. granarius (L.), Tribolium castaneum (Hbst.), Oryzaephilus surinamensis (L.), Rhyzopertha dominica (F.), Tenebroides mauritanicus (L.), and Cryptolestes pusillus (Schon.) transmitted Salmonella montevideo from wheat contaminated with 10(6) organisms/g to clean wheat. The insects were fed on the contaminated grain for 21 days and were then transferred to clean grain and...