Click-Beetle Pest Surveys
Project Lead
Juli Carrillo, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Land and Food Systems (PI)
Funding
Agriculture and Agri-food Canada, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council
About the Project
Click beetles, aka wireworms, are a pest of economic concern in BC. This project monitors for two species of click beetles, Agriotes lineatus and Agriotes obscurus, using AAFC (Agriculture and Agri-food Canada) pheromone traps. Ten of the proposed traps are baited for A. lineatus (the predominant European click beetle species in the BC region), and ten have a pheromone bait for A. obscurus (the other click beetle species in our area). The other twenty are unbaited pitfall traps. The purpose of the unbaited traps is to collect both males and females and to look at the sex ratio over time and other insect biodiversity. The site at the UBC Farm will be the first university farm added to the monitoring project, and will enable comparisons of pest abundance across different sites and cropping systems. It will also enable long-term ground-dwelling insect biodiversity estimates for the UBC Farm.