insects Article Combined Effects of Mating Disruption, Insecticides, and the Sterile Insect Technique on Cydia pomonella in New Zealand Rachael M. Horner 1,* , Peter L. Lo 2, David J. Rogers 2, James T. S. Walker 2 and David Maxwell Suckling 1,3 1 The New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research Limited, Private Bag 4704, Christchurch 8140, New Zealand;
[email protected] 2 The New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research Limited, Havelock North 4157, New Zealand;
[email protected] (P.L.L.);
[email protected] (D.J.R.);
[email protected] (J.T.S.W.) 3 School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland, Auckland 1072, New Zealand * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +64-3-940-3934 Received: 21 October 2020; Accepted: 25 November 2020; Published: 27 November 2020 Simple Summary: Codling moth is a major pest of apples, and was accidentally introduced into New Zealand over 150 years ago. Many countries that New Zealand exports apples to do not have codling moth present and they want to keep it out. Therefore, apple growers must heavily control codling moth populations on their orchards. Currently, the main control tactics are insecticide applications and mating disruption, which uses the moth’s own sex pheromone to make the males unable to find females to mate. We aimed to supplement these tactics with the sterile insect technique (SIT) to further suppress the codling moth on orchards. SIT involves mass rearing and sterilizing codling moth and then releasing them onto orchards where they mate with wild insects resulting in no offspring.