Impact Of Congeners And Harbourage Material On Bed Bug Response To A Volatile Aggregation Pheromone Lure

A standard behavioural test consists in releasing a number of bed bugs in an arena and counting after a given amount of time how many have been captured by a lure versus a control harbourage or trap. In such a test, high variability in control and lure catches may be observed for various reasons (lack of oriented search behaviour under still air conditions, aggregation behaviour, variation of behaviour over time), which limits the statistical power and the capacity to observe differences in attractivity among lure compositions. We used video tracking to explore whether the analysis of bed bug trajectories could offer a more robust testing paradigm as well as whether bed bug’s aggregation behaviour may influence the outcome of the test. We found that bed bugs explore with greater intensity areas close to the volatile lure, whether or not harbourages are present. In the presence of harbourages, bed bug behaviour once inside the harbourage was no longer dependant on lure presence or absence . The use of video tracking allowed to reliably evidence the attractivity effect of a volatile lure and can provide a platform for a deeper investigation of the interplay between chemical cues (volatile and non-volatile) and tactile cues (thigmotaxis) in mediating bed bug’s search for harbourage.