Team:CAU China/Hardware

In the process of our project, we communicated with researchers in many related fields, and finally confirmed and improved our project to make it more complete. In the early stage of the project, the research group of Professor Wangpeng Shi from the College of Plant Protection，China Agricultural University gave us a lot of help. Professor Shi recognized our idea of using RNAi to control locusts, and also gave us guidance and assistance in other related content. We communicated with Professor Shuo Yan, Associate Professor Chuan Cao, Dr. Xinzheng Huang, and Dr. Shugan Tan in the research group of Professor Shi on genetic selection and environmental safety, and they all provided us with valuable suggestions. In addition, we also contacted researcher Zehua Zhang from the Institute of Plant Protection of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. He discussed with us the feasibility of our project and the current status and future expectations of locust control.

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The desert locust plague that broke out in East Africa in 2020 continues to spread and has spread to South Asian countries such as India and Nepal. At the same time, a plague of yellow-spined bamboo locusts(Ceracris kiangsu Tsai) occurred in Laos. As a province bordering several South Asian countries, Yunnan Province faces the risk of locust invasion. So we decided to contact with the government department of Yunnan Province to get some information about the situation. So we got in touch with Mr. Ma Jianpeng, a staff member of the Forestry Pest Control and Quarantine Bureau of Dali, Yunnan Province (abbreviated as: Forest Inspection Bureau) on March 26, 2020, and interviewed him by e-mail, and quickly got his reply. We learned that although no locust plagues have been found in Yunnan Province, locust plague control exercises and related arrangements have been carried out in response to the risk of locust plagues in Southeast Asia. Once the locusts are found to gather, the staff members will report it level by level, respond quickly, and control the locust plague at the initial stage. In terms of prevention and control strategies, the policy of “prioritizing the use of biological control, scientifically and legally conducting chemical control” is adopted, and chemical blockade will be established when necessary to prevent proliferation.

In order to find out the current locust control strategies and the application prospects of our project, We try to get in touch with related companies. Luckily, the emails we sent got a reply from a company ——Beijing Ecoman Biotechnology Co., Ltd., a high-tech enterprise specializing in plant protection, which has advantages in locust control equipment and biological pesticides. We interviewed Mr. Liu Hong’an, the company's project manager on August 3 and August 5, and obtained a lot of valuable information. Manager Liu told us that the biological pesticides currently used to control locusts mainly include Microsporidium, Metarhizium ,Beauveria bassiana, and azadirachtin. At present, biological pesticides have some disadvantages such as slow onset of action, poor aging effects, short shelf life, high storage requirements, and high cost. We realize that we need to overcome these problems as much as possible to make our products have stronger advantages. He also mentioned that the current demand for locust control on the grassland is high, and the international demand is greater, which proves that our project has a larger application space and value. At the same time, we learned that the control of locusts must be carried out during the third-instar locust fly stage. If migratory locusts gather and take off, it is difficult to spray pesticides on the locusts and the effect will be greatly weakened. In terms of locust population detection, we learned that the company already has intelligent detection equipments, such as locust intelligent detectors and high-altitude observation lights, which can realize automatic monitoring of locust populations. Finally, Manager Liu also gave suggestions on where and how to obtain our modeling data, and told us the current quality problems that may exist in related data.

The desert locust plague that broke out in Africa in 2019 has aroused widespread concern around the world. Locust disasters are widespread and can cause huge losses. In the world, nearly 100 countries are involved, and the area of locust disasters is as high as 46.8 million square kilometers. The average annual damage area of natural grassland in China is 20,09 million hm2, and the annual agricultural area in locust-affected areas is 3.2 million hm2. In addition, through communication with experts and scholars, we learned that the public's attention and understanding of the locust disaster is limited. Therefore, we prepared a questionnaire to further investigate the public's attention and understanding of the locust disaster.

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