Introducing the Fan-trap, an inexpensive, light and scalable insect trap

Published on October 13, 2022, by Jean-Claude Grégoire

Monitoring is an important component of pest management, to prevent or mitigate outbreaks of native pests, and to check for quarantine organisms. Surveys often rely on trapping, especially when the target species respond to semiochemicals. Many traps are available for this purpose, but they are bulky in most cases, which raises transportation and deployment issues, and they are expensive, which limits the size and accuracy of any network. To overpass these difficulties, en-tomologists have used recycled material, such as modified plastic bottles, producing cheap and reliable traps but at the cost of recurrent handywork, not necessarily possible for all end-users (e.g., for national plant protection organizations). These bottle-traps have allowed very large sur-veys which would have been impossible with standard commercial traps, and we illustrate this approach with a few examples. Here we present, under a Creative Commons BY-SA License, the blueprint of a fan-trap, a foldable model, laser-cut from a sheet of polypropylene, that can rapidly be pro-duced in large numbers, and could be transported and deployed in the field with very little ef-forts. Our first field comparisons show that fan-traps are as efficient as bottle-traps, and we de-scribe two cases where they are being used for monitoring.

The Fan-trap documentation can be downloaded here.

Reference: Grégoire JC, Caiti E, Hasbroucq S, Molenberg JM, Willenz S (in prep*). When the beetles hit the fan. The Fan-trap, an inexpensive, light and scalable insect trap under a Creative Commons License, for monitoring and ex-perimental use