Abstract
The Mediterranean fruit fly (medfly), Ceratitis capitata, is a notorious insect pest causing huge economic losses worldwide. The sterile insect technique (SIT) is widely used for its control. Using sexually mature sterilized males of the Vienna 8 (tsl) strain in the laboratory, we explored whether exposure of males to citrus compounds (separately or in a mixture) affects their sexual behaviour and if nutritional conditions and age modulate those effects. Exposed males exhibited increased sexual signalling compared to unexposed ones, particularly when fed a rich adult diet. Interestingly, and for the first time reported in medfly, exposure of Vienna 8 males to a mixture of citrus compounds increases longevity under poor adult diet conditions. We discuss the possible associated mechanisms and provide some practical implications of our results towards improving the effectiveness of SIT.
Highlights
The sterile insect technique (SIT) is an environmentally friendly approach for suppressing or eradicating insect pests of medical and agricultural importance
The success of SIT depends on a variety of abiotic and biotic factors that affect the quality of produced insects [2]
Orange oil and the mixture performed significantly higher overall signalling activity relative to controls when they had access to yeast hydrolyzate (YS) while only the mixture had a strong impact in the case of sugar diet only (Tukey’s HSD test P
Summary
The sterile insect technique (SIT) is an environmentally friendly approach for suppressing or eradicating insect pests of medical and agricultural importance. During SIT operations, overwhelming numbers of mass reared, sterilized male insects are released systematically in the field to compete against feral males for wild females. The success of SIT depends on a variety of abiotic (environmental) and biotic factors that affect the quality of produced insects (i.e. sterile males’ dispersal ability, survival and mating competitiveness in the wild) [2]. The medfly is one of the most destructive agricultural insect pests worldwide, capable of infesting more than 300 species of fruits, nuts and vegetables causing extensive economic damages [3, 4]. Nowadays all SIT programs against C. capitata include male only releases and this was achieved by the development of genetic sexing strains (GSS) [5].
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