Scientists Use Insects’ Sex Hormones To Get Away From Pesticides

Farmers use pesticides to prevent their crops from being destroyed by pests. Still, many of them harm nearby ecosystems and pose health risks to us. New ecologically friendly pest management methods are required. One option that may soon become a significant success is focusing on these bugs' mating desires.

Using sex pheromones, female insects may attract males over distances of hundreds of meters and even over a kilometer-in total darkness without any auditory signal. The females that the men follow and mate with deposit eggs that hatch into ravenous larvae. Males follow the scent of these chemical messages. It has extraordinary chemical power that farmers may use.

Hong-Lei Wang, a researcher at the pheromone group at Lund University in Sweden, told Wired that researchers might use synthetic pheromone molecules in the field to mask the genuine signal from the actual female.

According to the researcher, this all-encompassing sex fragrance makes it more difficult for males to locate females and mate. As a result, the insect population declines, resulting in fewer pests harming crops.

Sex Signals to Hack Insects

This is how farmers have been employing synthetic pheromones for decades. Still, costs have prevented them from being utilized more broadly. Because it has been relatively expensive to produce synthetic pheromones, using them to protect high-value crops, such fruits have only made financial sense. Pheromone-based pest management is now more widespread because Wang and his colleagues have discovered a technique to generate pheromones that attract pests that consume less expensive crops like cabbage and beans economically and sustainably.

The team demonstrated how to extract considerable amounts of two crucial moth pheromones from an oilseed plant in a report published in Nature Sustainability. The synthesized pheromones were then shown effective in studies involving mass trapping and interfering with cotton bollworm mating.

Christer Löfstedt, the study's co-author and professor of functional zoology at Lund, said in the same Wired report that working out the mechanisms for pheromone synthesis in insects is the first step.

This was accomplished by examining the genes of the insects to identify the ones that regulate the generation of the desired sex pheromone. To produce the sex pheromone on a large scale, the scientists then transferred these genes into a new biological platform, an oilseed crop, though they may also use yeast. It was finally separated and purified to prepare the chemical for field testing.

How It Alters Insect Behavior

The beauty of pheromones is that they alter insects' behavior rather than killing them. According to Srinivasan Ramasamy, chief entomologist at the charity World Vegetable Center, this makes them more environmentally benign than insecticides, which frequently eradicate several species that are not the objective.

Pesticides are frequently discovered on non-target creatures in our ecosystems, soil, air, and water. They can affect various plants and animals, including fish, birds, and other wildlife, and essential soil bacteria and insects like bees, spiders, and mites.

Because insects can recognize when a pheromone transmission comes from one of their species, you may target the life cycle of particular pests while not affecting other insects. According to Wang, "Specificity is an obvious feature of the pheromones system."

There are many bugs out there who will benefit from it, as well as farmers and customers. The fact that insect pheromones are not poisonous to humans is a significant advantage for agricultural workers.

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