2025 Volume 69 Issue 2 Pages 53-63
The tomato leaf miner, Tuta absoluta（Meyrick）（Lepidoptera, Gelechiidae）, is a notorious transboundary pest of tomatoes native to South America that has recently invaded Asia via Africa and Europe. This species was first found in Japan in 2021 and has since been trapped in many prefectures using sex pheromone traps. Because non-target species are often captured in moth sex pheromone traps, the same is true for T. absoluta, so it is necessary to distinguish between non-target and target species when monitoring with sex pheromones. Among the 290 non-target male moths captured in traps with commercially available sex pheromone lures for T. absoluta in 2022 to 2023 at several locations in Japan, we identified all captured males and recognized 114 species belonging to 25 families. Among them, the sex pheromones of 22 species have been reported； however, their sex pheromone components do not coincide with that of T. absoluta. To facilitate reliable identification, morphological differences of adult males between T. absoluta and its close relative Phthorimaea operculella（Zeller）（Lepidoptera, Gelechiidae）, a known pest of solanaceous crops captured in the same traps, are discussed.
