A novel plant volatile attractant scheme to protect corn in China from the white-spotted flower chafer (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae: Cetoniinae)

摘要

Adult white-spotted flower chafers (WSFC), Protaetia brevitarsis, feed on developing sweet corn ears in China causing extensive losses in quality and quantity. Considering these losses, the lack of natural enemies caused by excessive past chemical pesticide use and a complete lack of present insecticides for acceptable use against WSFC on developing sweet corn, it is important to find novel measures for controlling this serious pest. The attractiveness of eight compounds, mainly phenolic compounds, fruit esters, acetoin, and some aliphatic alcohols, was established in a specially designed olfactometer. Subsequently, rubber dispensers containing 40-mg of those attractive compounds were hung in field plots on 12 sweet corn ears on the borders and down the center of 11 × 9.6-m plots comprised of 615 plants. One day later, the same ears were sprayed with Malathion. These attract-and-kill plots were maintained in 2006, 2007, and 2008, and provided substantial protection of non-treated ears in the same field. The mean damage value (DV from 0: none to 3: >5% eaten ears) and percent of damaged ears in the treated fields (DV: 0.8 ± 0.3, 0.8 ± 0.3, and 0.7 ± 0.3; % damage: 19.4, 19.4, and 19.0%) was significantly lower than that in control plots (DV: 1.8 ± 0.2, 2.0 ± 0.1, and 1.7 ± 0.1; % damage: 92.1, 89.7, and 95.0%) for 2006–2008. This attract-and-kill method gives sweet corn growers a method to protect their crops.