The electronic McPhail trap
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Author and article information
Abstract
Certain insects affect cultivations in a detrimental way. A notable case is the Olive fruit fly Bactrocera oleae (Diptera: Tephritidae) that in Europe alone causes billions of euros crop loss per year. Pests can be controlled with aerial and ground bait pesticide sprays, the efficiency of which depends on knowing the time and location of insect infestations as early as possible. The inspection of traps is currently carried out manually. Automatic monitoring traps can enhance efficient monitoring of flying pests by identifying and counting targeted pests as they enter the trap. This work deals with the hardware setup of an insect trap with an embedded opto-electronic sensor that automatically records insects as they fly in the trap. The sensors responsible for detecting the insect is an array of phototransistors receiving light from an infrared LED. The wing-beat recording is based on the interruption of the emitted light due to the partial occlusion from insect’s wings. We show that the recording are of high quality paving the way for automatic recognition and transmission of insect detections from the field to a smartphone. This work emphasizes the hardware implementation of the core sensor giving all necessary implementation details needed to construct it.
Cite this as
2014. The electronic McPhail trap. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e510v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.510v1note This preprint is not peer-reviewed. You may wish to reference the subsequent peer-reviewed version of this article.
Author comment
This work describes the electronic McPhail trap that is suitable for unattending monitoring of the olive fruit fly.
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Competing Interests
There are no competing interests.
Author Contributions
Ilyas Potamitis conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Iraklis Rigakis performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, reviewed drafts of the paper, hardware implementation.
Funding
This work was kindly funded by the Matching Funds 2010-2013 provided by the Greek General Secretariat of Research and Technology (GSRT) . The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
