Have you been relentlessly upset by the energy and time, much less the money, that you invest in totally eradicating Japanese knotweed from your garden, just to discover the spot green and healthy with new shoots a few days after?  This weed has been a big problem in United Kingdom for sometime.  Not long after its launch in the 1800’s, the plant has raided a lot of United Kingdom’s wastelands and land area.  It has posed a real threat to the native plant species as they are very resistant to numerous methods of eradication.  They crowd out native species and lower the species diversity in the region.

There have been very many ways employed to handle the growth and spread of the invasive Japanese knotweed, from pesticides to carefully removing the plants to adding its natural parasite, Aphalara itadori.  These psyllids, as they are called, are sap-sucking insects which are also native to Japan from where the weed also originated.  Aphalara itadori  is named jumping plant louse. The planned use of this psyllid is supported by scientific investigations from CABI but not everybody are thrilled to the concept.

The research has reached over some six years, testing more than two hundred preventive measures and has decided that the jumping plant louse is the perfect choice among all these.  It further lays down the explanation that makes this psyllid the best option, which is the reality that it is a sap-sucking insect, thus it is host limited.  This is to pacify arguments that the insect might relocate to local plants as soon as it is introduced into the ecosystem.  The insect will stunt its growth and make it less aggressive.  The insects will sip the juice from the plant in their larva stage.  These may not absolutely kill off the harmful weed.  The purpose is to render them more adaptable and make the control method more sustainable in the long run as well as cheaper.  An incredible sum of roughly 1.6 billion pounds yearly is used up on eradicating Japanese knotweed.

The addition of a non-indigenous species into the UK presents a biological threat, a lot of doubting Thomases say.  What took place in Australia after using cane toads being an organic pest control for beetles in 1935, just turned into an environmental menace today, may likewise occur in United Kingdom.  Another example was the introduction of harlequin ladybirds in some European countries for ecological control but it just needed them a short time to cross over the English Channel and placed the British ladybirds in danger.  Japanese knotweed removal by the introduction of the jumping plant louse is going to be a lengthy deliberation.  The showdown of these two, the Japanese knotweed and its leading rival, the jumping plant louse, will not happen in the near future.

Tags: garden, invasive weed, Japanese Knotweed, Japanese Knotweeds, Knotweeds, plant, removal of Japanese knotweed