Photos from the WFIWC Archives:
Equipment and Methodology
(A) screen cylinder coated with Stickum Special
Jar attached to the trap
(C2) Unmated females in a stem section
Through the work of Boyce Thompson Institute (Vite & chemists), the attractant pheromone, frontalin, was isolated from the southern pine beetle and subsequently found by Pitman to attract the Douglas-fir beetle. Such pheromones are synergized by monoterpenes in tree resin. Pitman proclaimed that camphene was the Douglas-fir monoterpene synergist for frontalin. However, I knew from earlier unrelated work that alpha pinene is the major component of Douglas-fir resin. In 1970, I set up a field test of these and other possible frontalin synergists at the Boise Basin Experimental Forest near Idaho City with assistance from R.F. Schmitz of my project at Moscow. It was a very robust experiment and produced an array of results. We tallied everything caught including 23 spp. of Scolytidae (I still use the name in historical settings), one of which was new and subsequently described as Hylugops reticulatus Wood. Also, 3 spp. of predators including Thanasimus undatulus (Say), which had been rarely collected (in subsequent tests in northern Idaho, we caught many hundreds and Schmitz studied it for his PhD thesis).
OK, so what about the alpha pinene/camphene squabble? Well, not to belabor the subject, it turned out that (in presence of frontalin) alpha pinene "caught" more than did camphene. However, stem sections containing unmated females, and raw resin itself, caught the most (indicating that other attractants were present in them). I concluded that any of those treatments placed on a live tree would be sufficient to result in mass attack. Due to the availability and low cost of alpha pinene (needn't be pure), it was used in subsequent tests. You can't imagine how stimulating it was to be back there during the discoveries of pheromones that were explaining so much about scolytid-related behavior that it had only been possible to wonder about by previous workers! Here was a research tool that would lead me on many trails during the next ten years, beginning with discovery of the antiaggregative effect of methylcyclohexene in 1971 (view subsequent MCH discovery, elution studies, or field tests). God, I could live forever! (Furniss & Schmitz 1971) -- Malcolm M. Furniss
Reference cited:
Furniss, M. M. and R. F. Schmitz. 1971. Comparative attraction of Douglas-fir beetles to frontalin and tree volatiles. USDA For. Serv. Res. Paper INT-96. 16 pp.
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