Population growth modeling of rose‌-‌grain aphid, Metopolophium dirhodum (Hemiptera: Aphididae) on wheat in field condition

Abstract

The rose-grain aphid, Metopolophium dirhodum is one of the most important species among wheat and barley aphids and its population trajectory in field is characterized by rapid boom. In the present study, three datasets from M. dirhodum population in a wheat field in Varamin (Tehran) from 1999 to 2001 and two datasets from a barley field in Aleshtar (Lorestan) in 2017 and 2018 were used for modeling the aphid population dynamics. We demonstrate that Normal and Hyperbolic Secant Squared models presented a much better description of M. dirhodum population dynamics in the whole season for all datasets from wheat and barley fields than the Exponential or Logistic Growth models. The Normal and Hyperbolic Secant Squared model analysis of data showed that the models were useful representations of the data, gave biologically reasonable descriptions of rose-grain aphid population dynamics, and were statistically powerful basis for the analysis of experimental data obtained in this research. The parameters of two mentioned models are the predicted peak size, Nmax, the predicted time of peak, tmax, and an approximate per capita birth rate, all of which are of interest in practical applications. Overall, the results of this study showed that the Normal and Hyperbolic Secant Squared regression models were shown to fit diverse abundance curves adequately and the parameters of the mechanical model can be estimated by the parameters of these models.

Keywords

• wheat
• rose-grain aphid
• population growth
• modeling