Influence of colour and design on the trapping efficiency of fruit flies in snake gourd

Vegetable acts an important role in human health for providing the essential nutrients, vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals and dietary fibre to reduce the health illness and disease. Cucurbits are the most important summer vegetables, which includes about 130 genera and 800 species around the world. The seed and fruit parts contains secondary metabolite compound like cucurbitacin, which act as laxative, cures nausea, vomiting and destroy parasitic worms in the human body. Snake gourd is an annual climber belongs to the family cucurbitaceae; is originated from India and regionally called it as serpent gourd, viper gourd, club gourd, snake squash, chichinda, padwal and pudalangai. Fruit flies are the most serious pest in snake gourd ecosystem and infestation start from fruit initiation stage to end of the crop. To reduce the fruit fly infestation and ecofriendly management of fruit flies, coloured traps were used in the field to maximize the trap catches. For the reason, the field experiment was carried out in farmer’s field at Kumaravadi village, Tiruchirappalli during second fortnight of February to second fortnight of March 2020. From our findings, the melon fruit fly, Zeugodacus cucurbitae trap catches was maximum in yellow coloured traps (29.56 fruit flies/trap/week) followed by green (24.25 fruit flies/trap/week), white (19.38 fruit flies/trap/week), transparent (15.31 fruit flies/trap/week) and red (11.50 fruit flies/trap/week). The oriental fruit fly, Bactrocera dorsalis population was trapped more in yellow trap (19.25 fruit flies/ trap/week) followed by transparent, green, red and white traps with the mean fruit fly catches of 14.81, 10.81, 10.38 and 8.94 fruit flies/trap/week, respectively. On comparing the overall trap catches, yellow coloured trap was the superior and trapped 195.25 fruit flies/trap followed by green (140.25 fruit flies/trap), transparent (120.50 fruit flies/trap), white (113.5 fruit flies/trap) and red colour traps (87.50 fruit flies/trap). The fruit fly catches in coloured traps were positively correlated with maximum and minimum temperature and negative correlation with rainfall and relative humidity in both cue lure and methyl eugenol attractant placed traps.