The crop losses in sericulture are directly related to unfavorable and/or highly variable environmental conditions along with poor quality of mulberry leaf. The quality of mulberry leaf depends on the location of the source and the state of environmental factors such as soil, water and air. Higher concentrations of fluoride, act as a cumulative poison and cause adverse effects on mulberry silkworm larvae at physiological and economic aspects in India and China. In India, especially the tropical and sub-tropical zones experience extreme variations in soil/climatic conditions and they form limiting factors for rearing the improved silkworm varieties. The quality of cocoon depend mainly on the healthy larval growth, which in turn reflects on the qualitative and quantitative nature of mulberry leaves fed during silkworm rearing besides adopting advanced rearing technologies. In the present study the cocoon commercial characters such as cocoon length, cocoon width, cocoon weight, shell weight, shell ratio, filament length, filament weight have significantly decreased on exposure to sub lethal (5.5 mg/kg b.w) and sub-sub lethal doses (2.75 mg/kg b.w) of fluoride compared to controls. But the level of decrease was more pronounced during sub lethal intoxication and marginal at sub-sub lethal dosages under fluoride stress. In our Protein metabolic profile studies, we observed a significant decrease in total proteins and a significant increase in the levels of the free amino acids, the activities of protease, aspartate aminotransferase, alanine aminotransferase and glutamate dehydrogenase and ammonia. However, the increase in the urea content was not significant. The variation in the protein metabolic profiles indicates the altered cellular metabolism thereby leading to lower cocoon production. Further it is observed that the influence of fluoride on cocoon production is significantly more on recently improved silkworm varieties. Thus fluoride occurrence in Indian peninsular region exhibits its negative influence on sericulture industry.

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1. Silkworm growth and nutrition  - Impact of fluoride toxicity
2. Fluoride bioaccumulation and electron microscopic study on fluorotic silkworm midgut