Nuclear techniques have considerable potential for various uses in biological control.
These applications should provide significant benefits to producing biological control agents and for using them to managing pests, facilitating trade, and protecting the environment. Non-parasitized hosts would be sterile, even further contributing to suppress the pest population. Irradiation would also help fulfilling quarantine regulations by avoiding the transport of other hitchhiking pests. Radiation of hosts during mass rearing would also avoid the emergence of fertile adults of the pest, or the need for costly procedures to separate parasitized from non-parasitized insects. In view that there are many reported cases of natural enemies becoming pests, and the fact that promising natural enemies are eventually not released because doubts persist as to their specificity after detailed assessments under quarantine conditions, safe field testing of specificity is a major use of ionizing radiation not exploited to date.