Towards improving sterile insect technique: Exposure to orange oil compounds increases sexual signalling and longevity in Ceratitis capitata males of the Vienna 8 GSS

Abstract

The Mediterranean fruit fly (medfly), Ceratitis capitata, is a notorious insect pest causing huge economic losses worldwide. The sterile insect technique (SIT) is widely used for its control. Using sexually mature sterilized males of the Vienna 8 (tsl) strain in the laboratory, we explored whether exposure of males to citrus compounds (separately or in a mixture) affects their sexual behaviour and if nutritional conditions and age modulate those effects. Exposed males exhibited increased sexual signalling compared to unexposed ones, particularly when fed a rich adult diet. Interestingly, and for the first time reported in medfly, exposure of Vienna 8 males to a mixture of citrus compounds increases longevity under poor adult diet conditions. We discuss the possible associated mechanisms and provide some practical implications of our results towards improving the effectiveness of SIT. © 2017 Kouloussis et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.