Stimulatory male volatiles for the Neotropical brown stink bug, Euschistus heros (F.) (Heteroptera: Pentatomidae)

Volatiles compounds collected from the male Neotropical brown stink bug, Euschistus heros (F.), a serious Central and South American soybean pest, have been reevaluated. The proportion of three methyl esters is found to be quite different from previous study. A new blend is proposed as the male-produced stimulatory volatiles based on gas chromatographic-electroantennographic detection (GC-EAD) techniques. The three GC-EAD-active components reproducibly found in volatiles collected from males are methyl (2E,4Z)-decadienoate (53%), methyl 2,6,10-trimethyldodecanoate (3%), and methyl 2,6,10-trimethyltridecanoate (44%) respectively. Males of this hemipteran species needed to reach an age of ~15 days to produce enough male-specific compounds to be detected by capillary column GC equipped with flame ionization detector (FID). The amounts of these three stimulatory volatiles increased with age and appeared to reach a maximum at ~35 days old, with the release rate of ~2.5 mg/day/male and the ratio of these three components seemed not to be affected by aging.