'Green zombie' mushrooms fight locusts

The green zombie fungus can make grasshoppers die by turning the insect into a green moss.

Chinese factories produce thousands of tons of green zombie mushrooms to combat grasshoppers raging in eastern Africa. Metarhizium is a genus of nearly 50 species, some of which have been genetically engineered for use as biological insecticides because its roots drill through the hard bones of insects and gradually kill them. In China, it is named lu jiang Jun which means green zombie fungus because this fungus will gradually kill and turn its host into a green moss mass.

There are currently dozens of factories across China that specialize in producing spore spores but have to shut down because of the Covid-19 epidemic. However, some factories have been put back in operation and shipping thousands of tons of mushroom spores to Africa. These factories are set up in a similar way to breweries, developing spores on rice under strict control conditions, ensuring accurate temperature and humidity.

Each plant can produce thousands of tons of mushroom powder per year, each gram containing tens of billions of spores. This need is especially urgent for East Africa at this time, where unusually high rainfall during the dry season has caused hundreds of billions of grasshoppers to proliferate in recent months.

So far, giant grasshoppers have devastated crops in countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda, which are continuing to move to neighboring countries. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has issued a warning about the situation considered to be the worst in decades. Hunger can affect 13 million people and drive up international food prices.

Last week, China's Science magazine reported that Somalia's government worked with FAO to discuss using a zombie to kill grasshoppers - the campaign rated as the biggest in the use of biological pesticides. to kill insects. Scientists do not believe the mushrooms will be strong enough to destroy the locust's breeding grounds in the long run. However, if proven to be effective, it could be an important weapon for targeting future insect outbreaks.

Green zombie fungus will strongly impact and destroy many young grasshoppers are multiplying in
Somalia.(Photo: AP).

It will take time to evaluate the effectiveness as each fungus will take several days to take effect and because of the enormous scale of the challenge; a single herd of locusts in Kenya is estimated to have had 100 billion to 200 billion. Grasshoppers have also moved to the East, reaching the Middle East with a speed of up to 150km a day. They are moving close to China with several neighboring countries including India and Pakistan.

At present, China's Ministry of Agriculture believes that some grasshoppers can follow the monsoon into the country, but the chances of them causing damage are minimal. Most scientists agree that grasshoppers will not have a lasting effect on food production, so developing countries need to exploit China's advanced locust killing technology.

Radar stations have been set up along the western and southern borders of China to detect locust clouds that incorporate unmanned devices that lure insects into traps to collect population and size data. their species size. The research team will bring equipment with locust survey software installed along the roads of the valley in the Himalayas or Gobi.

The data will then be sent to the Ministry's program command, planning and coordinating national efforts to prevent the outbreak. Scientists said the planes were full of biological and chemical sprays ready to take off to destroy the locusts.

"Today, most locust outbreaks in developing countries do not have advanced surveillance networks and cannot produce pesticides on a large scale , " said Li Hu, an associate professor at Dai. studied Chinese Agriculture in Beijing. China's grasshopper processing technologies are very advanced and often cheaper than competing solutions from the West, he said.

One drawback to Chinese research is that it only focuses on local species or grasshoppers that migrate in East Asia. Desert grasshoppers currently flooding East Africa have different genes and behaviors, Li warns that some of the methods work well in China but may not work elsewhere.

Grasshoppers are eaten by green zombie mushrooms from the inside out.(Photo: Chinese Academy of Sciences and University of Maryland).

Professor Kang Le, chief scientist of the grasshopper research program of the Zoological Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said a number of previous grasshopper outbreaks had been recorded in Yunnan and Tibet. but they only operate on small areas. The vast Xinjiang region of western China, which shares the border with eight countries, is too cold. This is not suitable for the migration of locusts. But when temperatures start to rise in the spring, grasshoppers will proliferate and spill over the Afghan border.

Previously, Chinese farmers had taken measures against grasshoppers such as creating large fires, burying them in water ditches or trying to kill them with sticks. In a campaign launched by General Yao Chong in 715, farms collected 9 million sacks of dead grasshoppers, helping to protect the majority of farmers' crops.

Recently, more advanced technologies have been implemented to address the threat from locusts. Some researchers have spent decades pursuing research on the territory, individual behavior and swarms of grasshoppers everywhere from coastal areas to inland deserts. In 2014, Chinese scientists published the world's most comprehensive genetic map of grasshoppers, successfully developing chemical agents to disorient them and disperse them.

Chinese researchers first became interested in the potential of green zombie mushrooms in the 1980s after discovering that South Pacific islanders used them to kill insects on coconut trees. Research by US scientists confirmed the effectiveness of this mushroom in the 1990s and the Chinese began to import green zombie mushrooms from the US and UK. After that, scientists continue to research to develop new stronger strains and mass production over the past decade.

According to a document published by the China Agricultural Science Association last year, a genetically engineered bacterium and another insect fungus can produce three times more numbers than the fungal spores. created in nature. When used in practice, no grasshopper epidemic has taken place in China during the past decade.

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