Revisiting research and methods in stemborer-rice interactions for integration into future breeding programs

Research into rice-stemborer interactions for pest management has gained renewed attention in the last 10–15 years. However, recent research has tended to overlook essential concepts around the nature of stemborer rice interactions that were developed between the 1960s and early 1990s. This lack of adequate attention to issues such as tolerance, compensation, and vulnerability is apparent from the limited range of bioassays and recorded parameters currently applied during research. Furthermore, aspects of intraspecific interactions between stemborers and between rice plants, and crop-mediated interspecific interactions between stemborers as determinants of crop damage have been almost entirely omitted from recent research. This review categorizes rice-stemborer interactions to help tease apart some of the factors that contribute to differential stemborer damage and yield losses. Furthermore, based on emerging knowledge of the relationship between damage and yield losses as rice plants grow and develop, the review highlights the need for considerably more attention to aspects of plant and crop tolerance, including a need to adequately develop phenotyping methods that assess genotypic differences in the plant’s capacity to compensate for damage. Since stemborers normally occur at low densities in well-managed rice landscapes, such attention to compensation for damage will potentially increase economic thresholds and, thereby, avoid pesticide applications.