Most Mottakina Akter¹, Keum Theary¹, Ekwipoo Kalkornsurapranee², Chandra Shekhar Prabhakar³, Narit Thaochan^{1, *}

 ¹Agricultural Innovation and Management Division, Faculty of Natural Resources, Prince of Songkla University, Songkhla, Thailand

²Department of Materials Science and Technology, Faculty of Science, Prince of Songkla University, Songkhla, Thailand

³Department of Entomology, Veer Kunwar Singh College of Agriculture, Bihar Agriculture University, Dumraon-802136, Buxar, Bihar, India

Abstract

Bactrocera dorsalis and Zeugodacus cucurbitae are the most economically important pests of fruits and vegetables production. Male lures like, methyl eugenol (ME) and cue lure (CL) in conjunction with insecticides are commercially used to attract and kill these pests. We investigated, herein, the application of plant essential oils (basil, clove, citronella, and eucalyptus) with ME and CL for both toxicity and attraction. Through the use of rubber foam as a base, basil oil (BO) was found to be highly toxic to B. dorsalis and Z. cucurbitae, and was evaluated for potency with ME and CL as effective attraction mechanisms. Our results found 15.7-20.3 % of attraction for B. dorsalis using ME, separately or mixed with basil oil. The separate CL found 20.3 % while the ME+CL mixture provided 21.5 % attraction for Z. cucurbitae. In field tests, a greater number of B. dorsalis were trapped with ME alone (20.4 fly/trap/day, FTD), whereas the attraction of the ME and BO mixture was relatively low. For Z. cucurbitae, ME+CL (0.1-0.7 FTD) and CL (0.2-0.6 FTD) trapped more flies than mixtures combining BO, suggesting that combinations of BO with ME in rubber foam bases may be a viable alternative for the control B. dorsalis but not for Z. cucurbitae.

Keywords: Para-pheromone, Mixed lure, Plant essential oils, Rubber foam, Attract and kill, Tephritid fruit fly