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Abstract
Agriotes pilosellus is a fairly common click beetle species distributed in open deciduous and mixed forests throughout a large area in Europe. To identify its sex pheromone, gland extracts of female beetles were analyzed using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). The only volatile compounds present in the extracts were geranyl butanoate and (E)-8-hydroxygeranyl dibutanoate in a 1:3 ratio, identified by comparison with synthetic samples. Field experiments revealed a clear attraction of A. pilosellus - males towards traps baited with geranyl butanoate, which could be synergistically enhanced by the factor of almost ten by addition of (E)-8-hydroxygeranyl dibutanoate. The latter compound alone did not show any attractive effect. Both compounds correspond well to the structures known from other Agriotes species and may serve as an effective monitoring tool for entomofaunistic research.
Highlights
With a body length of 13-17 mm, the click beetle Agriotes pilosellus is the largest of the 16 central European Agriotes species
The major compound at 49.9 min (RI 2112) exhibited a terpenoid mass spectrum (m/z 134, 152, and 154, Fig. 2), strongly resembling the spectrum of (E)-8-hydroxyneryl dihexanoate known from Agriotes acuminatus (Tolasch et al 2010)
The results of our study clearly show that the sex pheromone of Agriotes pilosellus consists of geranyl butanoate (1) and (E)-8-hydroxygeranyl dibutanoate (2) in a ratio of 1:3
Summary
With a body length of 13-17 mm, the click beetle Agriotes pilosellus is the largest of the 16 central European Agriotes species. With its unusual slender habitus and the pointed and diverging hind angles of the pronotum this click beetle strikingly differs from its congeners, resembling the closely related Ectinus aterrimus (L.) instead (Lohse 1979). Agriotes pilosellus is mainly a European species, distributed over central and south Europe from Spain to Turkey (Laibner 2000; Cate 2007). Northwards, records become more and more scattered. It is considered scarce in northern Germany (Horion 1953), vulnerable in Denmark (Wind and Pihl 2010), and extinct in Sweden (Lundberg and Gustafsson 1995). The species is absent in the other Scandinavian countries, the Baltic states, and Great Britain
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