Boing Boing

Machine tricks moths with sexy smells, sprays them with deadly fungus instead

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Here's an ingenious method to stop diamondback caterpillars from eating crops. It involves luring male moths into a machine that exudes sex pheromones. When a moth enters the machine, it gets covered with fungal spores (Entomophthorales?). The frustrated moth then flies back to the crop in search of a real female moth, but in short order the fungus starts eating the flesh of the moth. When the moth dies (it's shown in the video here stuck on a leaf) it decomposes into a moldy mess. The mold spores then drift off its body and infect the caterpillars around it, which undergo a similar fate. Then the crops are harvested so that humans can enjoy eating vegetables covered with bugs that were killed by a pathogenic (to caterpillars, anyway) fungus.

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