Nematocidal screening of essential oils and herbal extracts against Bursaphelenchus xylophilus

Five essential oils and 15 herbal extracts were evaluated to control Bursaphelenchus xylophillus in laboratory. The essential oils from clove plant (Syzygium aromaticum), mustard (Brassica integrefolia), thyme (Thymus vulgaris), and Pelargonium inquinans were found to be highly promising and gave excellent control of the nematodes at all the time of exposure. Among them, the least one gave 91.3% mean mortality rate at 24 hours of exposure time, which is highly significant from the control. While in the second study, most of the methanol (Desmodium caudatum, Paulownia coreana, Auckulandia lappa, Sophota flavescens, Aloe sp., Rheum palmatum, Zingiber officinale, Magnolia officinalis, and Eugenia caryophyllata), hexane (Torreya nucifera, Pharbitis nil, Prunus mume, Melia azedarach, and Xanthium strumarium), and hot water (Cinnamomum cassia) herbal extracts killed the nematodes, but in varying degrees compared to the control. Only one extract was found to be promising viz Magnolia officinalis which found to be statistically different from the control and gave mean mortality of 72, 82.3, and 85.3 % for 24, 48, and 72 hours exposure, respectively. Further screening was conducted for M. officinalis with concentrations of 1,000, 100, and 10 ppm against the same species of nematode with the same time of exposure. However, it gave an excellent result for 1,000 ppm for all time of exposure, whereas for the 100 and 10 ppm it gave mean mortality of 39.5 and 25.8% for the time 72 hrs, respectively that were statistically different from the control.