Recording daily trap catches of insect pests on the same day by combining a commercially available IoT monitoring camera with a sticky pheromone trap assembled from commercially available trap parts: a trial application to the beet armyworm <i>Spodoptera exigua</i>

Abstract

We aimed to easily make an automatic monitoring insect trap by combining a commercially available IoT monitoring camera with a sticky pheromone trap that was assembled from parts of commercially available sticky traps in order to grasp the number of daily trap catches of insect pests on the same day. This trap is hereafter referred to as the IoT camera-equipped sticky pheromone trap. In the present study, we applied the IoT camera-equipped sticky pheromone trap to Spodoptera exigua (Hübner) and examined whether it was possible to record the daily catches of S. exigua males by the trap. According to the predetermined settings, the IoT camera automatically took a picture (3 million pixels) of the sticky board capturing S. exigua males at 9:00 AM and then immediately sent the image with lowered resolution (0.3 million pixels) to a designated e-mail address via mobile networks (LTE) of a cellular carrier (NTT docomo). Trapped S. exigua males appearing in the sent images of the sticky board could be distinguished from other insects and counted on the monitor screen of a personal computer. The number of trapped males was also counted by directly checking the sticky board in the field every 2–4 days. On each day that trapped S. exigua males were directly counted in the field, the number of S. exigua males coincided with that counted through viewing the e-mailed image. These results suggest that the daily catches of S. exigua males can be grasped using the IoT camera-equipped sticky pheromone trap. Thus, this trap might be useful for monitoring the daily occurrence of insect pests, but this needs to be verified by applying it to various insect pest species.