Natural Enemies Handbook: The Illustrated Guide to Biological Pest Control (Publication (University of California (System). Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources), 3386.)

This book is the best-ever practical guide to the identification and biology of beneficial organisms that control pests. Growers, pest control advisers, landscape professionals, home gardeners, pest management teachers and students, and anyone fascinated by natural enemies and their prey will want this book to find, identify, and use natural enemies to control pests in almost any agricultural crop, garden, or landscape.

The Natural Enemies Handbook is superbly illustrated with 180 high-quality color photographs and 140 expertly rendered drawings, showing hundreds of predators, parasites, and pathogens that attack pest insects, mites, nematodes, plant pathogens, and weeds. The handy Quick Guide allows readers to locate natural enemies that they are likely to find on almost any crop or in the garden and landscape. They can then go to the main text for clear, detailed information.

Natural enemies are organisms that kill, decrease the reproductive potential, or otherwise reduce the numbers of other organisms. Biological control is the practical use of natural enemies to manage pests. Living natural enemies are the agents of biological control. Virtually every pest has natural enemies that reduce its populations under certain circumstances. The book features chapters on biological control of plant pathogens, nematodes, and weeds as well as individual chapters on parasites, predators, and pathogens of arthropods.

References, suppliers, and a comprehensive index make this an indispensable source book. The up-to-date review of applied biological control literature will appeal to scholars.

Mary Louise Flint is the Director of the Education and Publication Division of the Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Project, University of California, Davis. She is the author of Pests of the Garden and Small Farm (California, 1995) now in second edition. Steve H. Dreistadt is Senior Writer at the IPM Project. He and Flint are coeditors of Pests of Landscape Trees and Shrubs (1994).