Boing Boing Staging

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


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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