As an organizer of this symposium, one of my goals was to stress that managing resistance is a formidable task that will remain a perpetual pest management dilemma, because resistance is a fundamental survival response to stress by arthropods. Five papers were presented in this symposium at the 1994 annual meeting of the Florida Entomological Society, but one manuscript regarding the response by industry to resistance could not be published in this series. In the first paper, Gary Leibee and John Capinera assess the impact of resistance to pesticides in Florida and cite examples of resistance that limit pest management options. Julie Scott describes what we currently know about the molecular genetics of arthropod resistance to pesticides. The number of genes identified and the diversity of their effects on the physiology of arthropods verify that resistance is a normal response to diverse environmental stresses.
Pesticide resistance is part of a general stress response with a long evolutionary history.
B.t. provides microbial control of an increasingly diverse group of arthropod species and is an increasingly important tool for integrated pest management programs. The deployment of transgenic crop plants containing B.t. Despite the diversity of B.t. Thus, B.t. toxin genes are limited resources. Finally, I discuss a variety of resistance management methods and point out that we cannot really avoid resistance we can only delay its onset.