Department of Chemistry, University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY.
JEOL Inc.,, Peabody, MA.
J Med Entomol. 2020 Jul 4;57(4):994-1005. doi: 10.1093/jme/tjaa018.
The attraction of necrophagous insects, particularly blow flies, to corpses and carrion is of ecological, economic, and agricultural importance, although the mechanisms by which it occurs are not well understood. Much of the published research on blow fly attractants has focused on volatiles emitted from carrion surrogates, but little attention has been given to the possibility that blow fly eggs themselves may emit chemical cues that are responsible for conspecific and heterospecific insect attraction. In this study, the headspace volatiles emitted from eggs representing two aggregated oviposition events that were collected 1 mo apart from two species of the Calliphoridae family (Order: Diptera), Lucilia sericata (Meigen), and Phormia regina (Meigen) were analyzed via solid-phase microextraction-facilitated GC-MS. The volatiles' profiles were found to be consistent between samples representing the same species, but unique between the two species. Over 100 molecules covering a wide range of compound classes that included alcohols, aldehydes, esters, amines, ketones, and organosulfur compounds were identified. The profile of volatiles emitted from the L. sericata eggs contained several alkanes and aldehydes, whereas salient features of the P. regina headspace included numerous esters and ketones. Between the two species, 42 compounds were shared, several of which were carboxylic acids. Little overlap between the range of compounds detected and those reported to be emitted from decomposing remains was observed.
腐食性昆虫（尤其是麻蝇）对尸体和腐肉的吸引力在生态、经济和农业方面都具有重要意义，尽管其发生的机制尚未得到很好的理解。发表的关于麻蝇引诱剂的研究大多集中在腐肉替代物释放的挥发物上，但很少关注到麻蝇卵本身可能会释放出负责同种和异种昆虫吸引的化学线索。在这项研究中，我们通过固相微萃取辅助 GC-MS 分析了在相隔一个月的两次聚集产卵事件中收集的两种丽蝇科（双翅目）物种（L. sericata 和 P. regina）的卵的头部空间挥发物。发现来自相同物种的样本之间的挥发性物质图谱是一致的，但在两个物种之间是独特的。超过 100 种分子涵盖了广泛的化合物类别，包括醇、醛、酯、胺、酮和有机硫化合物。L. sericata 卵释放的挥发性物质图谱包含几种烷烃和醛，而 P. regina 头部空间的显著特征包括许多酯和酮。在这两个物种之间，有 42 种化合物是共同的，其中一些是羧酸。在检测到的化合物范围和据报道从分解物中释放的化合物之间几乎没有重叠。
