Pheromone mating-disruptant products

Hereon Insect Pheromone Mating-Disruptant Products... 

Pheromones are used primarily for monitoring pest populations, but their use as pest suppression tools has also been proposed. These alternative uses include mass trapping, mating disruption, and lure and kill. Although these approaches have been tried with varying levels of success in field and orchard crop systems, they have had limited application for the management of stored-product insects. 

When insects are ready to reproduce, they depend on chemical signals, called sex pheromones, to help find mates. Mature females emit the pheromones, and males of the same species are able to detect them in extremely low concentrations from far away. The males follow the chemical signal in order to find receptive females. You can make or buy pheromone lures to intercept and trap pests before they reach your garden. Some products use pheromones as mating disruption lures. These products work by flooding the air with female sex pheromones, making it difficult for male insects to find the females for mating. Pheromones have been used extensively in commer-... 

Knowledge of the specific structures of insect pheromones has permitted their chemical synthesis, allowing their commercial use for the suppression of pest populations by mating disruption (5) (Figure 1). The practical use of pheromone-based pest control products typically takes one of two forms. Either the pheromones are used as discrete baits in traps so that males are drawn into the traps and removed... 

Although mating disruption of Attagenus megatoma by pheromones has been demonstrated, permeation of a storage facility is not considered a good tactic, principally because residues absorbed on the stored products or containers may attract insects after the material has left the warehouse. 

Although the desired product is often produced in low yield, cross metathesis does not result in the loss of double bonds, and the olefin fragments remain intact hence, the byproducts can be recycled. Recycling is demonstrated in the application below, where cross metathesis is used to prepare an insect pheromone for the peach twig borer, an insect that attacks a variety of fruits (Eq. 6.15). The pheromone can be used to control the population of the insect through disruption of the insect s mating process [35]. 

Cross-metathesis of oleyl acetate and 3-hexene produces, with 3-dodecene and self-metathesis products of the acetate, 9-dodecenyl acetate, the pheromone of a leaf roller, Eucosma sonomana. Even the isomeric mixture obtained from this metathesis reaction was active in disrupting insect mating [23]. Although many other pheromones have been synthesized by use of homogeneous catalysts these reactions might also be performed with suitable heterogeneous catalysts. 

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