Sex Pheromone Licensed To Protect Crops

Matt Hopkins Posted by Matt Hopkins|16 December 2008

South Carolina Scientific, Inc., of Columbia, South Carolina, US, has been granted an exclusive license by the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) to produce and market an insect sex pheromone developed by Chemist Aijun Zhang at the ARS Invasive Insect Biocontrol and Behavior Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland. The pheromone, for which the initial development was performed under a research agreement between ARS and South Carolina Scientific, Inc., can help control the pink hibiscus mealybug, Maconellicoccus hirsutus, a crop pest that annually causes up to US$750 million in damage to US crops and severe economic problems worldwide by attacking a wide range of plants, including vegetable and citrus crops, forest trees, and many species of ornamental plants, reports ARS.

Work is now under way to improve the process for chemically producing the pheromone, which is placed inside sticky traps to draw in mealybug males, providing a much more economical, convenient, and useful detection and monitoring tool. In a second potential control strategy, Zhang found that relatively high concentrations of the pheromone repel males away from the source, which could control the pest by disrupting mating. As natural enemies of the pest aren’t lured to the pheromone source, scientists can chart the effectiveness of the biological controls used to combat the mealybug without artificially concentrating these natural enemies near the traps.