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Manipulation of Insect Behavior by Mating Disruption Technique

Insect pest management has relied predominantly on conventional insecticides, but due to wide spread concern over potential hazards and development of resistance, alternative control methods have been developed. One such potential management tactic is the use of pheromones as mating disruption technique in pest management. The idea of dispersing sex pheromones inside a crop canopy to prevent insect pests from reproducing initiated in the early 1960s which contributed to the development of chemical ecology and continued to be well-known for a variety of reasons. Mating disruption is a technique that affects sexual behaviour of insect by saturating the surrounding environment by synthetic sex pheromones, where the ability of males to recognize the natural sex pheromone produced by females are disrupted so delaying the time for females to mate. This approach can be successful when mating disruption targets the key pest at low population densities. The combination of pheromone formulations with other management tactics can increase the efficacy of the formulation on the target pest, help to prevent the development of resistance to any one given management tactic and contribute for the management of more than one insect pest.