A Novel Mating Disruption System Designed for Rapid Deployment of Reservoir Pheromone Dispensers

Larry Gut, Juan Huang and Peter McGhee
Department of Entomology, Michigan State University, Lansing, MI

Sex pheromone-based mating disruption is among the most effective biopesticides for managing various lepidopteran fruit crop pests, including codling moth (CM). An estimated 544,000 acres worldwide of apple, pear and walnuts, including 190,000 acres in North America, are treated with pheromone to control CM (Witzgall et al. 2008, Miller and Gut 2015). However, we suspect that less than 15% of the approx. 140,000 acres of apple orchards in the Eastern US use CM disruption. The most widely used CM mating disruption formulations require hand-applying hundreds of devices per acre. Thus, the product and application costs, as well as labor requirements, are high. New pheromone delivery systems are needed to provide Great Lakes growers with economical alternatives to maintain or develop sustainable IPM programs based on the use of mating disruption.