ABSTRACT
The term biological control was coined by the late Harry Smith of the University of California, who defined it as ‘‘the suppression of insect populations by the actions of their native or introduced enemies’’. There have been debates regarding the scope and definition of biological control ever since, mainly to accommodate the technological advances in the tools available for pest management. The definition presented by Van Drieshce and Bellows [1], ‘‘the use of parasitoid, predator, pathogen, antagonist, or competitor populations to suppress a pest population making it less abundant and thus less damaging than it would otherwise be,’’ appears to convey the current thinking on biological control by those researchers involved in insect research.
