Soukhovolsky V. G., Volkova P. E., Tarasova O. V. Modeling of Forest Insect Pheromone Communication System. Female as a Source of Information

How to cite: Soukhovolsky V. G.^{1, 2}, Volkova P. E.², Tarasova O. V.³ Modeling of forest insect pheromone communication system. Female as a source of information // Sibirskij Lesnoj Zurnal (Siberian Journal of Forest Science). 2014. N. 6: 69–79 (in Russian with English abstract).

© Soukhovolsky V. G., Volkova P. E., Tarasova O. V., 2014 

The system of pheromone communication in insects-phyllophages was considered in terms of its effectiveness as a communication system. A selected lepidopterous insect (Lepidoptera) was chosen for analysis of pheromone communication system. We analyzed data on 250 species of insects from three families – Lasiocampidae, Geometridae, Lymantriidae. Specificity of the chemical composition of the complex pheromones and pheromone component count was assessed for all of these females. Characteristics of complexes of insect pheromones and possible female strategies of behavior were modeled using the methods of information theory, utility theory and game theory. We estimated complementarity for various types of chemical compounds in pheromone composition. The uniqueness of the pheromone signal of separate species of Lepidoptera is achieved by using a multi-component pheromone. There are no hard links between existence or absence of individual components in multi-component pheromones. The model was proposed for explanation of regularities of pheromone composition. Nonmonotonic of relative frequency of insect species curve with different number of components can be explained in terms of a trade-off between increasing the efficiency of males seeking females of the same species with an increasing number of individual components and the complexity of the synthesis of pheromones multi-component pheromones. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was used to assess the validity of the model description. Possible mechanisms of pheromone signal amplification studied were associated with the aggregation of a large number of individuals in a limited area. If females in the process of attracting individuals of the opposite sex are aggregated, then the source of pheromones is not a private individual, but a group of females, and the intensity of the flow of the group of molecules is defined as the intensity of pheromone release pheromones individual animals and the number of females in the cluster. The analogy game-theoretic problem «Prisoner's dilemma» use for evaluating of the effectiveness of the group strategy to attract for the simplest case, which dealt with two players – the females capable of generating pheromone. The proposed approach allows evaluation of the reliability of the pheromone communication system in insects – phyllophages.