Natural Enemies of Blackflies and Midges
Literature Review
Blackfly Natural Enemies
General Survey
- Adler, P.H., D.C. Currie and D.M. Wood 2003. The black flies (Simuliidae) of North America. Cornell Univeristy Press.
- Crosskey, Roger W. 1990. The Natural History of Blackflies. John Wiley & Sons.
Chapter 10 deals with natural enemies by taxonomic group. For each taxonomic group, Crosskey has tables that list the parasite-host associations with approprate citations. Of the books on blackflies, this is the most up-to-date and easiest to read.
- Kim, Ke Chung and Merritt, Richard W. 1986. Black Flies: Ecology, Population Management, and Annotated World List. The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Chapters 23 and 24 deal with natural enemies. The text suffers from some redundancy because of different authors for the two chapters. The references are more convenient because each list of citations is at the end of the chapter, but again there is redundancy between chapters.
- Laird, Marshall 1981. Blackflies: The future for biological methods in integrated control. Academic Press.
Section IlI of this reference deals with "Predators, Parasites, and Pathogens." The four chapters in this section deal with specific taxonomic groups of natural enemies. This is an excellent introduction to the topic. Extensive citations are helpful, though they are a little dated.
Specific Studies
- Adler, P.H., Z. Wang and C.E. Beard 1996. First records of natural enemies from Chinese blackflies (Diptera: Simuliidae). Med. Entomol Zool. 47: 291-292.
- McCreadie, J.W. and P.H. Adler 1999. Parasites of larval black flies (Diptera: Simuliidae) and environmental factors associated with their distributions. Invert. Biol. 118: 310-318.
Chironomid Natural Enemies
General Survey
- Armitage, P., P.S. Cranston, and L.C.V. Pinder 1995. The Chironomidae: The biology and ecology of non-biting midges. Chapman and Hall.
Two chapters in this book deal with natural enemies. Chapter 12 by M. Tokeshi has a discussion of predation, mermithids and coelomomycetes. Chapter 13 by Arshad Ali provides a more systematic discussion about the biological control (pp 348-352) of chironomids with numerous references cited.
- Ali, Arshad 1991. Perspectives on management of pestiferous Chironomidae (Diptera), an emerging global problem. Journal of the American Mosquito Control Association 7:260-281.
This journal article covers much of the same ground as the source cited above.
Last modified 7 December 2006