Integrated Pest Management: Use of pheromones in IPM

During the past 68 years that have elapsed since the identification of the first insect pheromone (Butenandt, 1959) there has been a bourgeoning of basic and applied research that has resulted in an amazingly diverse and effective use of pheromones in IPM. Other behavior-modifying semiochemicals have had more limited success on a commercial level, althoughmuch research is continuing to try to find new ways to make such chemicals as host plant volatiles more useful in IPM settings as attractants or deterrents. Although pheromones have established themselves in IPM systems, most end-users and even applied researchers do not realize howmuchwork goes into identifying and optimizing pheromone blends so that they become highly species-specific and optimally attractive to the target species so that they can be used to the best effect. Research to determine the most effective pheromone blend compositions and dispenser dosages for monitoring and detection typically takes five to ten years to complete. Optimizing trap design targeting particular species can take several more years. Sometimes effective pheromones cannot be elucidated at all despite decades of intensive effort. Delivery of effective commercial products presents another hurdle. For instance, applied pheromone researchers may spend years establishing that a particularmating disruption system is highly effective at disruptingmating and reducing crop damage after conducting experiments in which disruptant dispenser dosages and deployment densities have been varied. A mating disruption system may work successfully from a biological standpoint, but at the commercial level it may be too costly or not sufficiently user-friendly compared to standard practices, and the system will have been judged to “fail” at this level. It is important to distinguish between failure in the commercial arena versus biological failure of the mating disruption system itself.