Development of an automatic monitoring trap for Mediterranean fruit fly (Ceratitis capitata) to optimize control applications frequency

Continuous monitoring of population fluctuations is important to improve the control of economic pests. The Mediterranean fruit fly [medfly; Ceratitis capitata (Wiedemann)] is a major economic pest of fruit crops worldwide, particularly in the Middle East. The current medfly weekly monitoring method, manual counting, results in a suboptimal spraying frequency in citrus orchards. This paper describes the development of an automatic trap for sequential medfly remote monitoring. To our knowledge, it is the first automatic trap developed for medfly monitoring. A new cylinder-shaped trap was designed, and optical sensors specifically created for detecting and counting dead or stunted Medflies were embedded in it. Field tests were conducted to estimate the trapping efficiency, accuracy and over-counting of the medfly Automatic Traps (medfly-ATs). medfly-ATs and Steiner traps were placed in commercial citrus orchards over five different periods between the years 2013 and 2015. The medfly-AT and conventional Steiner trap were found to have similar trapping efficiencies under field conditions. The accuracy of the medfly-AT counts ranged between 88% and 100%; the absolute over-counting in all experimental sites and periods was three flies. Over-counting was mostly due to ants and rain. The paper discusses the importance of field tests in evaluating the performance of automatic traps. Results of an informal experiment conducted in a commercial orchard showed that daily monitoring using the medfly-AT device holds promise for reducing insecticide applications, but extensive in-field experiments should be conducted to prove it.