December 1996, Volume 17 No. 6

Conference Reports

Alien Species

The UN Conference on Invasive Species was held in Trondheim, Norway, on 1-5 July. It was organized by the Norwegian Ministry of Environment on behalf of the United Nations Environment Programme and other international environmental interests, including IUCN, SCOPE and ICSU. National environment departments of 78 developed and developing countries were also represented, plus leading academics, conservation groups and environmental lawyers.

The meeting consisted largely of lectures and discussions which surveyed the problems caused by invasive species around the world, both in agriculture and the environment. Rob Hengeveld, Institute of Forestry and Nature Research, Wageningen, Netherlands, in an overview of the problems of invasive species, pointed out that the difficulties of predicting what will happen to a species after its transfer to a new area are due to a lack of baseline information on the situation before invasion rather than any inability to produce analytical models. Michael Clout, University of Auckland, New Zealand, explained the global role of the IUCN Invasive Species Specialist Group, and its newsletter Aliens (see BNI 17(1) 3N).

Michael Samways, University of Natal, South Africa, talked about managing insect invasions and pointed out the importance of natural enemies as key mortality factors and the need to implement biological control for species that have moved beyond quarantine and eradication measures. George Oduor, Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, explained how governments and other organizations are increasingly turning to biological control because it is cheap, non-disruptive ecologically and maintains biological diversity. A series of papers on the impact of alien species in different countries (Hawaii, New Zealand, Mauritius, South Africa, Australia) and ways of dealing with them rounded off the conference.

Delegates agreed that the problem was "immense, insidious, increasing and irreversible". They concluded that invasive species are the greatest threat to biodiversity worldwide, even greater than destruction of habitats, and that a global strategy and action plan to deal with the problem is urgently needed.

Culture Congress

The 8th International Congress for Culture Collections was held in Veldhoven, Netherlands, on 25-29 August and attracted over 260 participants. There were 4 plenary and 12 special symposia, 8 workshops and over 90 posters presented. The topics covered biodiversity, quality control, bioremediation, legal aspects, environmental risk, handling human pathogens, electronic communication, databases, diversity of collections, agricultural applications, and fungal infectious diseases. Many of the special symposia and workshops ran concurrently. Some points of interest arising from the scientific programme are given below.

Whilst many pharmaceutical and biotechnological companies are moving toward combinatory chemistry to provide active compounds, some companies are still exploring all avenues. Presentations by representatives of Novo Nordisk and Pfizer demonstrated that they were still screening cultures, but will only purchase material where special arrangements can be made that meet the requirements of the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD). However, E. Stackebrandt implied that biodiversity had little impact for microbial culture collections, as the majority of material collected was not being isolated in culture. He was not in favour of preserving soil samples for future analysis unless there was an initial assessment of what was there so it would be known if any part of the diversity had been lost. It was suggested that soil total DNA could be assessed. Dr Zavarzin, from Russia, suggested that it is impossible to isolate and grow some individual microorganisms, as they exist in interdependent communities in nature. This raises some implications for culturing the hitherto uncultured.

Novo Nordisk have an image database for all strains held in their collections. An integrated microbial database was described by J. Tiedje, in the USA, which is being constructed currently and will include links between databases on phylogeny and taxonomy, names, culture collections, ecology, phenotypes (properties) and sequence data.

Entomology in Florence

The 20th International Congress of Entomology was held in Florence, Italy, on 25-31 August. Organized by the Accademia Nazionale Italiana di Entomologia and the Società Entomologica Italiana, it was attended by over 3,000 delegates from many countries. The scientific programme covered most aspects of entomology and was divided into 24 sections, each of which was further subdivided into several symposia. The opening lecture, by E.O. Wilson of Harvard University, set a strong theme for the conference of biodiversity and the threats to its sustainability.

Of particular interest were Section 20 - Entomophagous Insects and Biological Control, Section 21 - General and Applied Insect Pathology, and Section 22 - Integrated Pest Management, although there were papers relevant to biological control and IPM in other sections. Section 20 was subdivided into symposia on artificial rearing (17 papers), egg parasitoids (13), host selection behaviour (13), functional morphology of parasitoids (6), predatory Hemiptera (9), Aphelinidae (12), stemborers of graminaceous crops (11) and importation and legislation issues affecting foreign exploration for natural enemies (8).

The last symposium was extremely well attended and most of the presentations and discussion centred around the related issues of the risks posed to nontarget organisms and current legislation regulating the importation of biological control agents. Unfortunately, most of the speakers and audience were from the USA, so the situation in North America and Hawaii dominated the debate. The evidence for nontarget effects appears to be weak, so there was more discussion of current legislation, which is now very restrictive in many developed countries and is preventing new projects from being initiated. The meeting did not reach any conclusions on dealing with the situation.

A proceedings containing the complete texts of the plenary lectures and abstracts of the oral and poster communications presented at the congress was produced for delegates. The next Congress is to be held in Brazil in 2000.

PROCEEDINGS

Cornell Conference

The poster abstracts from the Cornell Community Biological Control Conference held last April (see BNI 17(3) 48N) are now on the World Wide Web at:

http://www.nysaes.cornell.edu/ent/bcconf

The presentations and panel discussions will be "published" later.