Biological Control: A Major Component of the Pest Management Program for the Invasive Coconut Scale Insect, Reyne, in the Philippines.

The coconut scale insect, Reyne, caused a major pest outbreak in coconut plantations and stands in the Southern Tagalog region of Luzon Island in the Philippines between 2010 and 2015. To determine if parasitism by Barrion, Almarinez and Amalin, a native encyrtid, could have been a factor in the eventual management of the outbreak by 2015, we estimated and assessed its parasitization levels on colonies on field-collected samples from selected points in three provinces in the Southern Tagalog Region across three sampling periods. We observed that consistently occurred only in areas where populations occurred, with high parasitization levels in the Southern Tagalog sites from 2014 to 2015.