CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Leaf-cutting ants (Hymenoptera, Formicidae) are considered the most important herbivores in the Neotropics, due to the high level of defoliation that they cause. Beside leaves, they cut and carry enormous amounts of other plant materials to their nests, including stems, fruits, seeds and flowers. Because of its spectacular defoliator activity, leaf-cutting ants are considered pests in agriculture, forestry, and urban household. So far, the most used management strategies for the control of leaf-cutting ants include cultural and mechanical control and especially synthetic insecticides. The prolonged presence of these insecticides in the environment, has led to problems of contamination and bioaccumulation in the food chain. The growing awareness of these and other undesirable effects associated to the use of synthetic insecticides has stimulated the search for new tools, more benign to the environment, human health and the for the ecological balance. In this context, plants could be a source of eco-friendly pesticides. In order to find new substances for the control of A. lundii, a screening of ethanolic extracts derived from 110 native plants, was performed. This study showed that 8% of the extracts repelled the foraging, with a repellency index (RI) greater than 80%. Likewise, 10 extracts showed repellency with IR between 70 and 80%, while 79 extracts were inactive. The 13% of the extracts showed a strong attractant activity to A. lundii. One of the most active extracts, was that derived from the Anacardiaceae, Lithrea molleoides (IR = 100%), while one of its major components, (Z,Z)-5-trideca-4, 7-dienyl resorcinol (1) , showed IR = 100% to 50 g/cm2 of the substrate offered to ants.