A University of the Sunshine Coast (UniSC) researcher is milking hundreds of venomous spiders in the hope of creating a biological insecticide that can help farmers battle swarms of hungry locusts without killing honey bees.
Dr Shaodong Guo has already used Blue Mountains funnel-web spiders to develop a venom pesticide commercially approved for use against aphids, spider mites, thrips, and whiteflies in greenhouse fruit, vegetable and flower crops in the United States.
The scientist has now been awarded a $240,000 Advance Queensland Fellowship to help farmers fight locust plagues, one of Australian agriculture’s most serious pest threats.
“Pesticides [used for locusts] are normally not selective,” Dr Guo said.
“They target not only the pest but also beneficial insects like honey bees and even birds, frogs, and humans.
“But spider venom peptides [proteins] have high selectivity so they can specifically target a particular range of species.”
Dr Guo said UniSC was one of the few labs in the world experimenting with oral ingestion of arachnid venoms, which were eaten by pest insects after being sprayed on plants.
“We now have the world’s largest arachnid venom collection, comprising more than 750 species of spiders, scorpions and centipedes from around the globe,” he said.
“This is really an exciting story, spider venom is really cool, they can do a lot of stuff, like using them against diseases.”
A flying menace
Australia has three main pest species of native locusts, with adult plague locusts and spur-throated locusts capable of flying several hundred kilometres overnight.
Queensland Chief Scientist Kerrie Wilson praised Dr Guo as a worthy fellowship recipient.
Professor Wilson said his work had “the potential to not only benefit Queensland’s agricultural sector but establish Queensland as a global leader in locust pest management using bio insecticides”.
“While current control methods exist, they rely heavily on chemical insecticides, which have potential to impact non-target species such as bees and can impact our natural environment,” she said.
Where chemicals cannot be sprayed near waterways, wetlands or certified organic farms, the Australian Plague Locust Commission (APLC) has used an environmentally sensitive bio pesticide developed from the Australian fungus, Metarhizium acridum.
But the APLC advises not to use it within 5 kilometres of beehives because the product poses a potential hazard to honey bees, which “may collect high numbers of spores while foraging”.
Dr Guo said that unlike conventional chemical controls, which were “really nasty” and could remain intact in soil and water for months, highly potent spider venom was fully biodegradable and could be applied to crops on the same day as harvest.
Industry collaboration
The Colere Group is collaborating with Dr Guo on the locust fellowship project, which could take years to yield results.
“These are mostly ancient spider lines that are very reliant on their venom to kill the insects very quickly,” managing director Paul Meibusch said.
“These are spiders that don’t have webs, so trapdoors and funnel webs.
“They go and hunt their prey and jump on them and inject their venom.
“There’s also a number of cave spiders that hang on threads and catch insects as they go past so they’re very reliant on very quick activity.”
Mr Meibusch, who used to work for Australia’s Grains Research and Development Corporation, said if the arachnid venom peptides [short proteins] were able to be synthesised in a fermentation process, they could potentially be used on juvenile locusts breeding in national parks.
“You don’t want to be using a nasty pesticide in those areas, and you can’t, so we’ve got agriculture lying there, waiting for these pests to come flying out,” he said.
“If we want to get ahead of the curve, we need to target them [locusts] where they are before they get there.”
Mr Meibusch said spider venom’s short proteins broke down quickly in the environment.
“They’re not going to hang around, they’re not going to go through the food chain, they’re not going to bioaccumulate.
“If a dead insect falls on the ground and is eaten by ants and spiders it won’t hurt them.”
He said the venom worked by passing through the gut wall of the targeted insect and entering their equivalent of a bloodstream.
“They’re neurotoxins, so they’re acting on the key neuroreceptors and, in this case, we’ve been looking at the sodium and calcium channels — well understood areas in insects,” Mr Meibusch said.
“If it’s an oral activity then the beneficials aren’t eating the plant. They might walk over it but that won’t matter.”
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