This study evaluated the field efficacy of the commercial repellent tumerone against the red palm weevil (RPW), Rhynchophorus ferrugineus , using a trap???shutdown approach. Descriptive and inferential analyses revealed clear differences among treatments in their ability to suppress adult RPW captures. The untreated control recorded the highest mean catch (5.00 ± 2.45 RPW trap −1 ), followed by the diesel treatment (3.00 ± 1.41 RPW trap −1 ), whereas the botanical repellent resulted in zero captures across all replicates. Relative to the control, diesel reduced trap catch by 40%, while the repellent achieved complete suppression (100%). Friedman’s two???way analysis of variance confirmed a significant overall treatment effect (N = 4, ?? 2 = 8.000, df = 2, p = 0.018), with mean ranks indicating the strongest reduction under the repellent treatment. Post hoc comparisons showed that only the repellent differed significantly from the control (adjusted p = 0.014), while diesel did not differ significantly from either treatment. Overall, the botanical repellent exhibited the highest repel???lency and was the only treatment that significantly reduced RPW captures relative to untreated control, whereas diesel produced a non???significant numerical reduction under field conditions. These findings highlight the potential of tumerone???based repellents to contribute to a push–pull strategy for sustainable RPW management.
Hamadttu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.