Monday, 15 November 2004
D0062

Behavior and attraction of sap beetles to different stages of strawberry fruit

Crystal Kelts, gatorbug21@hotmail.com1, Oscar Liburd, oeliburd@mail.ifas.ufl.edu1, and Baldwyn Torto, btorto@gainesville.usda.ufl.edu2. (1) University of Florida, Department of Entomology and Nematology, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL, (2) USDA-ARS, Chemistry Department, 1700 S. W. 23rd Drive, P. O. Box 14565, Gainesville, FL

Field and laboratory experiments were conducted to detect populations of sap beetles in strawberries, and to understand behavioral response to volatile composition. Eight plants from 2 center rows in each plot(48 plants per treatment) were sampled for sap beetles. Sampling was done by visually counting the number of sap beetles per treatment on a weekly basis. There were 4 treatments arranged in a randomized block design. Treatments were replicated 6 times and included 1) dry strawberries 2)ripe strawberries 3)over-ripe strawberries 4)ground litter. We examined dry, ripe, over-ripe strawberries, and ground litter for presence of sap beetles. The results indicated that over-ripe strawberries had significantly more (>80% ) sap beetles encountered in the field compared with other treatments. Over-ripe strawberries had 10.6 times as many sap beetles as ground litter treatment after 3 weeks. There were no significant differences in the number of sap beetles recorded in ripe, dry, and ground litter treatments. In laboratory experiments using gas chromatography (GC) we recorded compounds of ripe, dry, and over-ripe strawberries. The volatile profile from over-ripe strawberries was both qualitatively and quantitatively richer than those of ripe and dry strawberries. This may account for the increased number of sap beetles found in over-ripe strawberries. However, more studies will be needed to confirm this hypothesis.


Species 1: Coleoptera Nitidulidae Lobiopa insularis (picnic beetle)
Species 2: Coleoptera Nitidulidae Stelidota geminata (strawberry sap beetle)
Keywords: Strawberry, Pests

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