Insect Pests of Fruits, Plantation, Medicinal & Aromatic Crops

Life table

• Life table is a condensed tabulation of certain vital statistics of insect population, which provides a format for recording, and accounting for all population change is the life cycle of a species. So the construction of life table is an important component in the understanding of the population dynamics of a species. But it takes considerable time and manpower to obtain realistic results. If carried out correctly life table remain the most important analytical technique available for identifying key mortality components in an insect pest’s life cycle.
  
• Age specific life tables are more commonly used in entomology than time- specific life tables. The former are based on the fate of a real cohort throughout a generation, while the latter are based on the fate of an imaginary cohort. Age specific life table provides a means of identifying the potential role of parasitoids and predators in the regulation of pest population. The data required to construct a life table for key factor analysis are a series of successive samples taken from each life stage of a generation. The first step in constructing a life table is to obtain an estimate of the potential natality (Number of individual entering post-ovarial stage). This is calculated from an estimate of the mean fecundity per female, which is multiplied by the number of female of reproductive age. Mortality refers to the total mortality obtained in a population.