ABSTRACT
Scores of papers about insect rearing include the expression “mass rearing”; however, many of these papers deal with production of only a few hundred to several thousand insects per week. “Mass rearing” includes only programs where the number of progeny produced per day equals one million times the number of offspring that can be produced by a single female per day (Mackauer 1972). A similar number is stated by Chambers (1977) who set the boundaries of mass rearing as 10,000-1,000,000 times the reproductive potential of a female from a native population. Dyck (2010) also offers a useful discussion of the scope and complexities of rearing that can be truly considered “mass rearing.” As a rule, most sources agree that large-scale rearing operations are characterized by employment of articial diets and higher degrees of automation than that in smaller-scale operations (Nordlund et al. 2001).
