Potential Application of Pheromones in Monitoring, Mating Disruption, and Control of ClickBeetles (Coleoptera: Elateridae)

Abstract

Wireworms, the larvae stage of click beetles (family, Elateridae), are serious soil dwelling pests of small grain, corn, sugar beet, and potato crops globally. Since the 1950s, conventional insecticides such as lindane provided effective and inexpensive protection from wireworms, and little integrated pest management research (IPM) was conducted. The removal of these products from the agricultural market, particularly Lindane, has resulted in increasing levels of wireworm damage to small grain, corn, and potato crops. The wireworm damage has become an increasing problem for growers, so the demand for a meaningful risk assessment and useful methods to restrict damage is increasing. However, due to the cryptic habitat of the wireworms, pest control is very difficult and leads to unsatisfying results. The prospective appropriateness of sex pheromone traps for employing management strategies against wireworm’s populations was first suggested with experimentation in Hungary and Italy. Simultaneously, considerable work has been done on the identification and use of pheromone traps to monitor population of click beetles. The work has been mostly done in European and former Soviet Union countries. For this paper, we reviewed what work has been done in monitoring the click beetle which was considered as pests and how the pheromones can be used in IPM to monitor and control wireworms/click beetles. Also, the possibilities of using the pheromone-baited traps for mating disruption and control tested in the fields were summarized.