More than a pest management tool — 45 years of practical experience with insect pheromones in stored-product and material protection

Abstract

The application of pheromone-baited traps to control pest insects in stored food or materials has become well established over the past decades. The main pheromone components of all major stored-product and material pests have been identified. Pest monitoring with pheromone traps is a key factor in integrated pest management to estimate population density build-ups and they may be used to define economic threshold levels. Male-attracting sex pheromones, e.g. for stored-product pyralids, the clothes moths, and some anobiid beetles, are especially effective in this aspect. Monitoring pest population can facilitate optimal spatial and temporal control strategies, including efficacy evaluation of the implemented control measures. In addition to the sex pheromones, some beetles, such as grain and flour beetles, utilize aggregation pheromones, which attract both sexes. Implementation of these pheromones for mass trapping, which works well for the control of bark beetles in the forest environment, has been less successful for stored-product protection for various reasons and is thus not an established means of control. When the monitoring tools are used in landscape areas, scrublands, forests, and away from anthropogenic influenced environments, natural reservoirs of a pest species and sources of new infestations can be identified. In addition to an economically driven adoption of pheromone traps, they may also provide information of a pest’s general biology. Because stored-product and material pests must be considered neozoons in most parts of the world, their occurrence in natural habitats indicates a species’ autecological capability to successfully compete with native species and to become fau-nistically established in non-synanthropic environments outside their zoogeographic origin. This review focuses on the use of pheromone traps for monitoring in outdoor situations.