Sterilization of Pink Bollworm Adults with Metepa

Sterilization studies of the pink bollworm, Pectinophora gossypiella (Saunders), were begun after screw-worms, Cochliomyia hominivorax (Coquerel), were eradicated from the Island of Curacao (Lindquist 1955, Baumhover et al. 1955) and from the Southeastern United States (Knipling 1960) through the release of males sterilized by gamma irradiation. The pink bollworm also can be sterilized by gamma irradiation (Ouye et al. 1964a), but the sterilized males do not compete well for females with nonsterile males (M. T. Ouye, unpublished data). Therefore, another method of sterilizing pink bollworms was desirable.