The Canterbury earthquake and its aftermath may have set back some of Landcare Research's weed control work by a year.
Senior biocontrol researcher Hugh Gourlay says after-shocks knocked out the power to its new facility at Lincoln, where insects being assessed as possible control agents for pest plants are housed and bred.
He says the power failure caused the facility to overheat, wiping out most of the populations of two insects he'd brought back from Colombia in South America.
Mr Gourlay says it's probably set the research back by a year because he's not likely to get back to Colombia until July next year to collect the two insect species that were lost.
He says most of a small population of a Brazilian beetle being reared to control another weed, Tradescantia, or wandering willie, was also destroyed. That breeding programme had been going for almost three years.
