Transcript
MACLEAN VAQALO: The adult beetle is doing the damage, the female lays eggs in the materials in the soil and then it develops in this habitat but it is the adult that is doing the damage. You won't know you have the beetle until you see the damage and that happens around three to four months after the damage has been done.
DON WISEMAN: So the SPC with some support from other organisations, you're doing work in Samoa, you're bringing in male aggregate pheromones, now what do you do with that?
MV: Yes the male aggregate pheromones is for two functions, one is it can actually do the control, you need to have about one drop per hectare of a large area in the plantation to do a control.
DW: What do you mean by a control? You mean you're killing them presumably.
MV: What happens is the pheromone is attracting the male and the females are also getting into the traps and that way we can kill whatever comes to the traps.
DW: So the trap is something separate from the pheromone or the pheromone is the trap?
MV: Actually the pheromone is a separate thing, the pheromone is the attractant and it has to be put into a trap to trap the beetle as they are drawn to the pheromones it's not a pesticide or insecticide that kills the beetle, it's just an attractant that attracts the male as well as the females into the trap.
DW: And with this work with male pheromone, do you think you'll be able to eliminate rhinoceros beetle from Samoa or just limit the numbers?
MV: There is no way we can eradicate the rhinoceros beetle using pheromones, they have tried it in Guam and it didn't work well, they still have the beetle.
DW: You think though that you can severely limit the numbers?
MV: Yes if we can use it in collaboration with other methods I think we can put down the population.
DW: Other measures being what?
MV: There is a base management approach to controlling rhinoceros beetle, the main thing would be sanitation, getting rid of all the breeding sites in the plantation as well as use of biological controls such as fungus, and there is also an effective virus that is still out there in the fields which does tremendous control to the beetles so it's a combination of all these including insecticide if a farmer would like to go into that as well.
