Abstract
The prevention and extermination of insect pests in agricultural applications has until now mainly relied on the dissemination of various insecticides. However, due to the recent heightened level of awareness among consumers regarding the safety of agricultural products, there is a rising demand for physical methods of controlling insect populations rather than relying on agricultural chemicals. The authors have been studying the development of an instrument for controlling insect pests that utilises an ultra-high luminance light emitting diode (LED). We have been focusing on the way the insects' vision reacts to chromatic stimuli. To establish a baseline for our work, in this experiment we studied the electro-retinal characteristics of both the plautia stali family, the helicoverepa armigera and the spodoptea litura family in terms of both the wavelength of light and their frequency response to pulsed light. The experimental results reveal the following:
1) The ERG signal reached its peak at a wavelength of between 490 and 520nm, which covers the first half of the visible region of the wave length spectrum.
2) The frequency response experiment showed that the maximum frequency response (fmax) for the spodoptea litura was 45Hz, for the helicoverepa armigera was 50Hz, and for the plautia stali was 32Hz.
Based on the above results, we have been able to obtain fundamental data to develop a light source instrument to control insect pests that utilises illumination from an LED.
