The ability to use inexpensive, noninvasive sensors to accurately classify flying insects would have significant implications for entomological research, and allow for the development of many useful applications in vector control for both medical and agricultural entomology. Given this, the last sixty years have seen many research efforts on this task. To date, however, none of this research has had a lasting impact. In this work, we explain this lack of progress. We attribute the stagnation on this problem to several factors, including the use of acoustic sensing devices, the overreliance on the single feature of wingbeat frequency, and the attempts to learn complex models with relatively little data. In contrast, we show that pseudo-acoustic optical sensors can produce vastly superior data, that we can exploit additional features, both intrinsic and extrinsic to the insect’s flight behavior, and that a Bayesian classification approach allows us to efficiently learn classification models that are very robust to overfitting. We demonstrate our findings with large scale experiments, as measured both by the number of insects and the number of species considered.

The use of insect sex pheromones is an alternative technology for pest control in agriculture and forestry, which, in contrast to insecticides, does not have adverse effects on human health or environment and is efficient also against insecticide-resistant insect populations. Due to the high cost of chemically synthesized pheromones, mating disruption applications are currently primarily targeting higher value crops, such as fruits. Here we demonstrate a biotechnological method for the production of (Z)-hexadec-11-en-1-ol and (Z)-tetradec-9-en-1-ol, using engineered yeast cell factories. These unsaturated fatty alcohols are pheromone components or the immediate precursors of pheromone components of several economically important moth pests. Biosynthetic pathways towards several pheromones or their precursors were reconstructed in the oleaginous yeast Yarrowia lipolytica, which was further metabolically engineered for improved pheromone biosynthesis by decreasing fatty alcohol degradation and downregulating storage lipid accumulation. The sex pheromone of the cotton bollworm Helicoverpa armigera was produced by oxidation of fermented fatty alcohols into corresponding aldehydes. The resulting yeast-derived pheromone was just as efficient and specific for trapping of H. armigera male moths in cotton fields in Greece as a conventionally produced synthetic pheromone mixture. We further demonstrated the production of (Z)-tetradec-9-en-1-yl acetate, the main pheromone component of the fall armyworm Spodoptera frugiperda. Taken together our work describes a biotech platform for the production of commercially relevant titres of moth pheromones for pest control via yeast fermentation.

The invasion of the spotted wing drosophila, Drosophila suzukii Matsumura, across the Americas and Europe has led to increased insecticide applications to protect fruit crops. This insecticide usage conflicts with integrated pest management programs, as well as harvest, export, and pollination services in the affected crops. A novel management tool was assessed against D. suzukii that may mitigate these conflicts. HOOK SWD, an attract-and-kill (A&K) formulation applied as a sprayable bait, was evaluated for three growing seasons in two berry crops in New Jersey and California. In blueberry crops treated with HOOK SWD, fruit infestations by D. suzukii were 2–8 times lower than in untreated crops. In trials in commercial raspberry fields, weekly or biweekly HOOK SWD applications combined with a single grower standard D. suzukii-targeted cover spray resulted in nearly 2–5 times fewer fruit infestations compared to the grower standard cover spray alone. Assays of the residual activity of HOOK SWD resulted in more than 78–93% adult D. suzukii mortality when exposed to raspberry leaves after the formulation had aged for 35 d in the field under plastic hoop houses. These results suggest that this A&K strategy can be integrated in D. suzukii management programs.

Pheromones have become an environmentally friendly alternative to conventional insecticides for pest control. Most current pheromone-based pest control products target lepidopteran pests of high-value crops, as today’s manufacturing processes cannot yet produce pheromones at low enough costs to enable their use for lower-value crops, especially commodity crops.Camelina sativaseeds genetically modified to express (Z)-11-hexadecenoic acid, a sex pheromone precursor of several moth species, provided the oil from which the precursor was isolated, purified and transformed into the final pheromone. Trap lures containing this pheromone were then assessed for their capacity to manage moth pests in the field. Plant-derived pheromone lures proved equally effective as synthetic pheromone lures in monitoring the diamondback moth,Plutella xylostella, in cabbage and disrupting mating of cotton bollworm,Helicoverpa armigera, in common bean fields. Our study demonstrates the biological efficacy and economic feasibility of pheromone production in plant factories by metabolic engineering of an oilseed crop.

We proposed a system that uses inexpensive, noninvasive pseudo-acoustic optical sensors to automatically and accurately detect, count,...