Potential Application of Pheromones in Monitoring, Mating Disruption, and Control of Click Beetles (Coleoptera: Elateridae)

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.

Biology, Ecology, and Control of Elaterid Beetles in Agricultural Land

“…A number of successful and unsuccessful attempts at reducing female oviposition via male mass trapping or using sex pheromones to cause mating confusion have been reported (116,155,172). The tactical and economic difficulties involved with these approaches when applied at the field scale have been pointed out (173), but many of these drawbacks are significantly reduced when such methods are directed at source wireworm populations concentrated in the nonfarmed grassy areas surrounding arable fields (17,173).…”

“…There are currently three main methods of sampling used for infestation risk assessment: soil cores and bait traps for sampling wireworms directly from the soil, and sex pheromone traps for aboveground sampling of adult male click beetles (discussed in detail in 9,111,116,155).…”

“…Female-produced sex pheromones have been described for approximately 30 elaterids in North America, Europe, and Asia, mostly within the Agriotes and Melanotus genera (155), and baits and traps have subsequently been developed to capture walking and flying adult male click beetles of several species in Europe and North America (116,155). These traps were originally intended to be a surrogate for soil sampling, based on the assumption that aboveground adult populations are representative of those of their belowground larvae.…”

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“…Pheromones are efficient at low pest population densities, with no adverse effect on natural enemies, and their use leads to a long-term reduction in insect pest populations that cannot be accomplished with conventional insecticides 9 . Traps baited with pheromone lures will be helpful in early detection of pest, mating disruption and timing of management procedures based on threshold 10 . Mass trapping of cocoa mirids has been efficiently done by pheromone trapping 11 .…”

Wireworm (Coleoptera: Elateridae) genomic analysis reveals putative cryptic species, population structure, and adaptation to pest control

“…They typically live in the soil for 2-11 years, depending on the species and environmental conditions. Wireworms are becoming increasingly prevalent in croplands because pesticides that effectively controlled them are no longer commercially available due to concerns regarding human and environmental health 3,4 . Current methods for controlling wireworms are far less effective; the new generation insecticides are neonicotinoids, which only temporarily debilitate or repel the wireworms, without causing substantial mortality [5][6][7][8][9][10] .…”