Establishing abiotic and biotic factors necessary for reliable male pheromone production and attraction to pheromones by female plum curculios<i>Conotrachelus nenuphar</i>(Coleoptera: Curculionidae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The plum curculio (PC), Conotrachelus nenuphar Herbst (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), is a key pest of stone and pome fruit in North America. Though grandisoic acid (GA) was identified as a male-produced aggregation pheromone for this species, other components likely exist, as have been identified for various curculionids. To better determine these components, an understanding of the conditions necessary for optimum pheromone production and attraction is needed, this is essential for the improvement of monitoring techniques and to achieve better biological control. The goal of this study was to determine the biotic and abiotic factors influencing both the response to pheromones and pheromone production. Tests were conducted in a dual-choice still-air vertical olfactometer using live male PCs as odour sources and live females as responders, to determine which physiological factors (age, number of males, mating status) influenced female response to males. Head-space collections of GA production under various conditions (airflow rate and frequency, collection zone strata, variation of humidity, temperature, and presence of a harbourage) were also done, as were electroantennograms (EAG) using synthetic pheromone mixtures. Results revealed that for both strains, the odour of two virgin mature males elicited significantly greater and more consistent attraction from mature virgin females than other ages and numbers of males when compared with the control. Head-space collections indicate that male PC have increased production of GA under high humidity in the presence of fruit, indicating that these conditions are necessary for optimal pheromone production and collection. EAG studies revealed significant responses to GrandLures I, II, III/IV and to the positive enantiomer of GA, and the amplitude of the signal varied with concentration. Our data identify the optimal physiological state and conditions at which pheromone collections should be performed, and what physiological life stages respond to these stimuli. These results have implications for optimising monitoring tools for this serious crop pest. This species has a northern univoltine strain and a southern multivoltine strain, both of which were examined in this study.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".