Abstract
Wireworms, the larvae stage of click beetles (family, Elateridae), are serious soil dwelling pests of small grain, corn, sugar beet, and potato crops globally. Since the 1950s, conventional insecticides such as lindane provided effective and inexpensive protection from wireworms, and little integrated pest management research (IPM) was conducted. The removal of these products from the agricultural market, particularly Lindane, has resulted in increasing levels of wireworm damage to small grain, corn, and potato crops. The wireworm damage has become an increasing problem for growers, so the demand for a meaningful risk assessment and useful methods to restrict damage is increasing. However, due to the cryptic habitat of the wireworms, pest control is very difficult and leads to unsatisfying results. The prospective appropriateness of sex pheromone traps for employing management strategies against wireworm’s populations was first suggested with experimentation in Hungary and Italy. Simultaneously, considerable work has been done on the identification and use of pheromone traps to monitor population of click beetles. The work has been mostly done in European and former Soviet Union countries. For this paper, we reviewed what work has been done in monitoring the click beetle which was considered as pests and how the pheromones can be used in IPM to monitor and control wireworms/click beetles. Also, the possibilities of using the pheromone-baited traps for mating disruption and control tested in the fields were summarized.
Highlights
Wireworms are the larval forms of click beetles (Coleoptera: Elateridae), inflicting damage to many important crops around the world, primarily through the subterranean feeding of plant roots and tubers [1]
Nagamine and Kinjo [44] reported on the population parameters of M. okinawensis by using water pan traps baited with synthetic sex pheromone in the field
Pheromones of click beetles were identified especially to be the dominant species in Europe [6, 26]
Summary
Wireworms are the larval forms of click beetles (Coleoptera: Elateridae), inflicting damage to many important crops around the world, primarily through the subterranean feeding of plant roots and tubers [1]. The wireworm as pests on agricultural crops has been controlled until 2009 through the use of lindane (gamma HCH). No work was carried out after that because the chemical lindane known as gamma-hexachlorocyclohexane was available and had been used as a seed treatment. This chemical was effective against wireworms and gave good control. Since there is no substitute for these chemicals available, wireworms became serious pests causing damage to potatoes, wheat, barley, vegetable, and other major crops throughout the world. Wireworms can attack both spring and fall-seeded crops. The aim was to present the identified and synthesized pheromones and employed methodology
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