The electronic McPhail trap

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.