Fecundity Dynamics of the Khapra Beetle, Trogoderma granarium Everts (Col.:Dermestidae) Under Cold Atmospheric Plasma in Laboratory

Abstract

Mahmoud Soufbaf, Mahdiyeh Bakhtiyari-Ramezani, Hassan Hosseinkhani and Mojtaba Nohekhan

The khapra beetle, Trogoderma granarium Everts (Col.: Dermestidae), an important warehouse insect pest, responded positively to cold atmospheric plasma under constant environmental conditions. We supposed that 120s plasma treatment acted as a hormesis factor on the beetle’ one-day-old larvae that could trigger higher fecundity in subsequent adults than their untreated counterparts. We applied time series analysis looking for expected short-term fluctuations in time series of fecundity due to triggering effect of plasma application against the pest. Moreover, the best combination of autoregressive and moving average processes was chosen to construct the fecundity prediction model. As expected, moving average process could smooth out fecundity data series under plasma effect and among different parameter combinations, first order coupled Autoregressive-Moving average ARMA (1,1) and pure Autoregressive AR(1) models were the best fitted ones to the fecundity data in plasma and control series, respectively.

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