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Chemistry and Agriculture: Helping to Feed the World
Published in Richard J. Sundberg, The Chemical Century, 2017
The environmental and ecological disadvantages of insecticides have spurred efforts to develop other approaches to control of insect pests. This is called integrated pest management, implying that several aspects of insect biology and behavior are targeted in a way that maximizes effective control of pests, while minimizing environmental impact. The most successful examples of integrated pest management are based on the pheromones that insects use for sexual attraction or as alarm, aggregation, and trail signals. These are typically mixtures of volatile compounds including hydrocarbons, alcohols, and esters. Many pheromones have been isolated from insects and characterized by structure determination. In many cases, it has been possible to synthesize the individual components of the pheromone mixtures. There are several ways that pheromones can be used in agriculture. The most widely used application is for monitoring. By use of pheromone-baited traps, the level of insect infestation can be determined. This information can be used to optimize the application of conventional insecticides. Pheromones can also be used for baiting traps in combination with lethal insecticides. The sex pheromones can generate confusing signals that reduce the likelihood of successful mating.
Reproduction
Published in Alan G. Heath, Water Pollution and Fish Physiology, 2018
Sex pheromones are secreted externally and affect conspecifics. Some actually serve as hormones within the individual thus coordinating both gametogenesis and spawning behavior. The pheromones may be steroids or prostaglandins and are detected by the olfactory system (Stacey, 1991). Because a number of pollutant chemicals have been shown to reduce the sensitivity of the olfactory system (see Chapter 12), this might be a mechanism by which chemicals could reduce spawning success, although there is currently no experimental evidence on this.
Spark
Published in Matthew L. Moseley, Ignition, 2021
Humans, like almost every other living organism, rely on pheromones for behavioral cues. We involuntarily give off and receive these complex chemical compounds through scent, taste, and other receptors. Sometimes referred to as ecto-hormones for the way they trigger reactions in others, pheromones constitute an entire communication system, a catalyst for species perpetuation. As fundamental as pheromones are in serving our most basic instinct — reproduction — communication, extrapolated to its broader applications, is just as elemental to any notion of success.
Towards engineering manufacturing systems for mass personalisation: a stigmergic approach
Published in International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 2021
Rotimi Ogunsakin, Cesar A. Marin, Nikolay Mehandjiev
Table 4 shows the summary of parameter values for the experiment. The coefficient ρ, which determines how fast the deposited trail (pheromone) disappears from the virtual system is selected by evaluating several ρ values ranging from 0.001 to 0.1. The value ρ = 0.045 is observed to be the value of ρ for best convergence when the number m of product-ants in the virtual layer is set to 120. The number of robots (products and material handling systems) in the work in progress (WIP) of the real system at simulation time is set to 10. This implies that each robot (product holon) delegates exploration task to 12 product-ants in the virtual layer. The number of available production machines is set to six in the physical layer, which is equivalent to the parameter n in the virtual layer. The default speed of product-ants is set to 0.7; this value is changed automatically based on the flow cost between resources. The speed of resource-ant is set to in the virtual and physical layer.
Swarm intelligence in anomaly detection systems: an overview
Published in International Journal of Computers and Applications, 2021
Sanju Mishra, Rafid Sagban, Ali Yakoob, Niketa Gandhi
ACO is a meta-heuristic to solve optimization problems simulating the behaviors of ant colonies in biology such as the food foraging behavior [27]. Ants swarm is being able to continually locate the shortest way from their nest to the food. Ants lay a chemical substance called Pheromone into the ground through their trip searching for food [28]. Laid pheromone will attract forager ants to follow the same trip paths. The other ants find and move to the location with the chemical substance, ants will tend to move along the path instead of moving in a random pattern. After some time, in some paths, the chemical substance or pheromone will evaporate which results in the reduction of attracting the ants and then they find and move to the position with pheromone which is more likely to strengthen the attraction. At the end of the path, the ants with poor performance will disappear. ACO meta-heuristic transformed this natural optimization into a computational optimization process for problem solving.
Animal-in-the-loop system to investigate adaptive behavior
Published in Advanced Robotics, 2018
S. Shigaki, M. R. Fikri, C. Hernandez Reyes, T. Sakurai, N. Ando, D. Kurabayashi, R. Kanzaki, H. Sezutsu
We tested the operation of the AIL system by conducting behavioral experiments. In verification experiments, we give ethanol stimulus to the AIL system and confirm whether the quadrotor elicits the programmed behavior reflecting the movements of the moth. We evaluated the angular velocity because the programmed behavior of the moth mostly consists of rotational motion [9]. In this verification experiment, we used a normal moth that cannot react to blue light. We impregnated ethanol and l pheromone (Bombykol [9]) with l in the filter paper for the stimulus input and control input, respectively. Figure 5 shows the result of measuring the behavior of moth and quadrotor for 15 s. We measured the quadrotor behavior at a sampling frequency of 30 Hz using a camera (BSW20KM11BK, BUFFALO, Japan) installed on the ceiling. The moth or quadrotor rotates counterclockwise and clockwise when the angular velocity of Figure 5 takes positive and negative values, respectively. As a result of calculating dynamic time warping which is a method of measuring the degree of similarity of time series data, the degree of similarity between angular velocities was 2.2. Therefore, we found that the quadrotor correctly reflects the behavior of the moth, and determined that the AIL system is functioning correctly.