Location: Horticultural Crops Disease and Pest Management Research Unit
Project Number: 2072-22000-044-055-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Sep 1, 2025
End Date: Aug 31, 2027
Objective:
1. Identify active pheromonal components and their ratios in the western flower thrips.
2. Identify active pheromonal components and their ratios in the grey garden slug.
3. Evaluate the effects of active components on thrips and slugs.
Approach:
Thrips: Chemical analysis of volatiles from adult male and female thrips will be conducted. A major challenge in studying thrips pheromones is the reliable detection of extremely small amounts of volatile compounds produced by individual insects. To address this, one hundred 1–3-day-old male or female thrips will be placed in a 2 mL glass vial for volatile collection using solid-phase microextraction (SPME). Each SPME sample will be analyzed by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS), utilizing the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 2020 Mass Spectral Library for compound identification.