Study of alarm pheromones of Colorado potato beetles

Abstract

Study of pheromones of insects could give knowledge not only about ways of their communication and spreading information but also could be powerful tool to biologically control population of harmful insects that damage economy by destroying harvest. Colorado potato beetle Lepinotarsa decemlineata (Say) (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae) is one of these kind of insects that need to be controlled. Alarm and sex pheromones of the beetles were well studied by numbers of scientists around the world and even synthetic forms of them were synthesized. Meanwhile, alarm pheromones of Colorado potato beetles that are liberated during traumatic or stressful situations were not deeply studied and covered in relevant literature. This article describes experiments involving the beetles and attempts to collect alarm pheromones. Purpose of experiments were checking the effect of the pheromones on the beetles that are not under stressful conditions and running NMR-spectroscopy in order to compare results with spectrogram of aggregation pheromone that is described in the literature. The results showed that Colrado potato beetles responded with escape behavior when exposed to the extracted pheromones. NMR-spectroscopy analysis showed more signals and resemblance between the extract from abdominal parts of the beetles and aggregation pheromone.