New technologies already make it possible to mass-produce pheromones that stop the reproduction of pests by changing their behavior. Every year, various insects destroy more than 20% of the world’s harvest. Farmers are fighting pests with pesticides, but some of them are harmful to health, and many to ecosystems.
In search of more environmentally friendly solutions, scientists have long been interested in the processes of reproduction of pests. It is known that female insects in complete darkness attract partners without making any sound, i.e. by distinguishing sexual pheromones. Males smell them and trace them by smell to females, which can be hundreds of meters away, in some cases a kilometer or further away.
Artificial pheromones
“We can spread artificial pheromones all over the field to hover in the air and mask the signal from a real female,” explains Hong-Lei Wang, a researcher of pheromone groups at Lund University.
According to him, the fog of pheromones greatly complicates the male’s ability to find a female, so the population begins to disappear.
Farmers have been using pheromones in this way for decades, but to a limited extent. The main obstacle is the high production costs, which until now have made it worthwhile to store only high-value nutritional crops, such as fruits, with synthetic pheromones.
H. L. Wang and his colleagues have discovered a way to make not only cheaper ones, but also pests that eat cheaper crops (for example, cabbage, beans) that attract pheromones.
The biggest advantage of pheromones is that they do not kill insects, only affect their behavior, in contrast to pesticides, which often kill many other, unrelated species. In addition, pheromones are not toxic to humans, and insects do not develop resistance to their own communication signals over time.