Fruit Sampling Guidelines for Area-Wide Fruit Fly Programmes

Book excerpt: Population survey is a basic component of any area-wide integrated pest management programme. Pest surveillance measures have to be practical, cost-effective and provide reliable information to action programme managers. Fruit fly trapping provides useful information on the presence or absence of the pest, and on its relative spatial distribution and abundance. However, performance and thus effectiveness of trapping systems can be affected by extrinsic factors including changing environmental and ecological conditions. Under certain conditions, fruit sampling becomes a suitable tool for population sampling. For example, at the beginning or end of the fruiting season when fewer mature fruits are still available on the trees, larvae could be more easily detected. Fruit sampling also becomes an important pest detection tool in areas where sterile flies are being continuously released and where low-density trapping is kept to avoid high sterile fly recapture rate and where traps are aimed basically at monitoring the released sterile flies.