Live Traps for Adult Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs

Abstract

Surveillance for detection of the brown marmorated stink bug, Halyomorpha halys, is reliant on sticky panels with aggregation pheromone, which are low cost, but very inefficient (est. 3%). Trapping for adults was conducted in Italy with novel live (or lethal) traps consisting of aggregation pheromone-baited cylinders with a wind vane, with the upwind end covered by mesh and the downwind end sealed by a removable entry-only mesh cone, admitting the attracted bugs. The novel traps caught up to 15-times more adult H. halys than identically-baited sticky panels in two weeks of daily checking (n = 6 replicates) (the new live traps were, in Run 1, 5-, 9-, 15-, 13-, 4-, 12-, 2-fold; and in Run 2, 7-, 1-, 3-, 7-, 6-, 6-, and 5-fold better than sticky traps, daily). The maximum catch of the new traps was 96 live adults in one trap in 24 h and the average improvement was ~7-fold compared with sticky panels. The rotating live traps, which exploit a mesh funnel facing the plume downwind that proved useful for collecting adults, could also be used to kill bugs. We expect that commercially-available traps could replace the crude prototypes we constructed quickly from local materials, at low cost, as long as the principles of a suitable plume structure were observed, as we discuss. The traps could be useful for the sterile insect technique, supporting rearing colonies, or to kill bugs.