Synergistic Blends of Monoterpenes for Aggregation Pheromones of the Mountain Pine Beetle (Coleoptera: Curculionidae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The superiority of the host monoterpene myrcene as a synergist for trans-verbenol and exo-brevicomin, aggregation pheromone components of the mountain pine beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), suggests that the ancestral host of the mountain pine beetle is a pine rich in myrcene. A field trapping experiment in British Columbia testing reconstituted bole oleoresin of whitebark pine, Pinus albicaulis Engelmann, composed of mainly myrcene (20.7%), terpinolene (6.8%), and 3-carene (61.9%) showed it to be a better pheromone synergist than reconstituted bole oleoresin of lodgepole pine, Pinus contorta variety latifolia Engelmann, which contained only 2.7, 1.0, and 6.0%, respectively, of the above-mentioned three compounds. In the same experiment myrcene alone was the best synergist. In subsequent experiments, testing myrcene, terpinolene and 3-carene alone and in all possible binary and ternary combinations, a 50:50 blend of myrcene and terpinolene released at the same rate as either compound alone generally resulted in trap catches approximately 3 times higher than with myrcene as a synergist. This result held as long as the terpinolene was free of contaminants, and the traps were in the open, well away from potential interference of semiochemicals emitted by newly attacked trees. 3-Carene seemed to be inert or slightly inhibitory. No single monoterpene tested alone or in binary or ternary combination in the absence of pheromones was attractive. There was no effect of doubling or tripling the release rate of myrcene or terpinolene. In five of nine experiments, adding terpinolene to myrcene caused a significant increase in the percentage of female mountain pine beetles captured. Among host pines, the presence of highly synergistic monoterpenes at various levels in combination with other monoterpenes that are apparently either inert or inhibitory could account for different degrees of pheromone synergism, and thus host preference. The highly synergistic effect of combining myrcene plus terpinolene with the mountain pine beetle aggregation pheromone components opens up the potential for suppression of populations through semiochemical-based mass trapping.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".