How to Control Pest by Using Insect Pheromones?

Posted by Tylor Keller on May 30th, 2019

Pest control has always been a headache for all of us. As for the history of pest control, it can be traced back thousands of years. We usually have some solutions to control pests. The most common examples are natural enemies such as cats and mice, geckos and mosquitoes, bugs and frogs. This pest-eliminating solution has the least harm to our environment. There is also a method of poisoning bait, which is a common method of controlling the population of mice and flies. Insecticides are also commonly used to control pests, but pesticides can be harmful to human health. Now we have a new way to control pests - using insect pheromones. Maybe you will be curious, how to control pests by using insect pheromones?

First of all, what is insect pheromones?

Insect pheromones are trace behavioral regulators that are released by insects and transmitted as information within or between species. In other words, the insect pheromone is a hormone substance secreted by the insect itself to regulate insect behavior, and can also be artificially synthesized.

And how to control pests by using Insect pheromone?

Since the 1960s, insect pheromone interference has become one of the pest control technologies. Compared with other methods, insect pheromones are known for their high efficiency, non-toxicity and pollution-free. So this technology can be used indoors and outdoors. 

The first method is the trapping method. This method uses a synthetic preparation of sex pheromones to capture male moths and then kill them with viscose or poison. This method can effectively reduce the reproduction of female moths. For phototropic pests, a combination of a sex pheromone preparation and an anti-mite lamp is usually used. The specific method is to apply sex pheromone preparation on the top of the lamp and fill the container with an effective insecticide. This method has proven to have a very significant trapping effect.

The second method is the mating disruption. In the place where the pests gather, synthetic sex pheromone preparations are used to disperse the odor of the sexual attractant, so that the male moth can not distinguish the sexual attractant released by the female moth and lose the direction of the female moth, thereby destroying the mating between the male and female moth and achieving the goal of reducing the number of pests.

The third method is to induce sterilization, which refers to the use of a sex pheromone preparation in combination with a sterilization agent. The specific method is to induce and concentrate the male moth with the sexual attractant, and then make the hind tarsus of male moths to contact the sterilization agent membrane to produce sterilization effect, and then put the sterilized male moth back into the field to mate with the female moth, so that the eggs produced by the female moths cannot be fertilized, so achieving the purpose of pest controlling.

In conclusion, using insect pheromones to control pests is achieved by reducing the survival rate and increase the mortality rate of the pests. And the specific method of using insect pheromones to control pests is to interfere with the normal growth and development of pests, resulting in their death or loss of reproductive capacity.