Fishing – trapping – and vermin destroying – Traps – Insect
Reexamination Certificate
2000-08-30
2003-01-14
Jordan, Charles T. (Department: 3644)
Fishing, trapping, and vermin destroying
Traps
Insect
C424S405000, C424S416000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06505434
ABSTRACT:
The present invention relates to an adhesive insect trap in the form of a one-piece, attractant-containing arrangement for attracting insects with attractants and trapping the thus attracted insects by means of a pressure-sensitive adhesive surface. Furthermore, the invention relates to a process for the production and use of the arrangement.
Arrangements for attracting and trapping insects with attractant traps are commonly known. They are employed as an important means of pest control and are especially used for the early detection of insects and evaluation of the intensity of infestation, i.e. for population monitoring. In addition, they provide the possibility of monitoring the success of chemical pest control measures. Furthermore, they can be applied for total pest eradication in the case low insect population densities, e.g. in private households.
All attractant traps currently used in practice function on the same principle: the volatile attractants are released from the trap to the surroundings and dispersed in the air space. The destructive insects, which are sensitive to even minor attractant stimuli, deliberately go in search of the “odor source”. Once they have been attracted, they generally remain stuck to the adhesive surface of the trapping arrangement.
The attractants which are employed are either feeding attractants simulating insect food or so-called pheromones. Pheromones are species-specific aromatic substances produced by the insects themselves for the purpose of communication and can be divided into various pheromone types, including sexual pheromones and aggregation pheromones. Sexual attractants serve the finding of a partner: the sexually mature female, ready to mate, attracts male animals with its scent. Aggregation pheromones, which are, unlike sexual pheromones, produced by both sexes, serve to communicate to members of the same species that the emitter of the pheromones has found a suitable feeding and/or breeding substrate.
Synthetically produced attractants can be processed in various ways for their commercial use in the field of insect monitoring. They can be bound to a polymeric carrier material (rubber, polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride or cellulose derivatives) and placed on the adhesive surface of the trap in the form of a separate baiting agent, e.g. a capsule, or they can be incorporated into the adhesive.
Depending on the type of integration of attractants in an insect trap, the state-of-the-art adhesive insect traps available on the market can be subdivided into three groups, of which a short description will be given in the following:
A Two-component Systems
These are systems which comprise a trap body with a pressure-sensitive adhesive surface (adhesive panel or strip) and a separately packaged attractant baiting agent. The bait is removed from its package before use and attached to the pressure-sensitive adhesive surface.
State-of-the-art baiting agents can have various embodiments, e.g. in the form of capsules, bags or caps, and contain one or more attractants (combination bait). Almost all commercial baiting agents contain sexual pheromones. The pheromone substance is bound to a carrier material and can diffuse unhindered from the material throughout the period of application of the trap.
To prevent the loss of pheromones during storage, the bait is generally packaged in an odorproof material.
In the practice of pest control, the application of such two-component insect trapping arrangements has the following disadvantages—among others—and is accordingly problematic:
As the pheromone substances are only released from the above described bait to the surrounding air by means of diffusion, the release rate is relatively high in the initial phase of application due to the initially high concentration gradient, but it strongly decreases in the course of time. It is not possible to maintain a continuous and constant release of pheromones throughout longer periods of application with these systems.
The content of pheromone active substances in the bait cannot be exactly regulated due to its production process, which comprises thermal steps, and due to the high volatility of the active substances.
The two-component structure necessitates a higher packaging effort because both components, the adhesive layer of the trap body and the pheromone bait, are subject to aging processes and must be protected against environmental influences during storage.
Due to the two-component structure, these traps are relatively complicated to operate, which is significant especially in the case of commercial pest control.
B One-piece Systems with Laminate Structure
To make insect traps more user-friendly especially in their operation, one-piece systems have been developed in the past.
These chiefly comprise the arrangements described in the Japanese patents JP 4-300804 and JP 54-28825. These relate to adhesive insect traps, preferably for application in the monitoring of cockroach infestation, which do not have a separate baiting agent. In the traps described in the above mentioned patent specifications, the attractant is integrated in a polymer layer. The active substance-containing film containing feeding attractants, on the one hand faces the carrier substrate of the trap body and is on the other hand covered with a pressure-sensitive adhesive layer, so that the complete functional unit of the trapping arrangement has a two-layered or multi-layered structure.
The integration of the attracting means into the trapping means of the adhesive panel of the trap avoids the disadvantage of complicated operation, but the problem of a continuous and constant attractant release remains unsolved.
According to the above mentioned documents, the attractants are present in the polymer layer in a dissolved or dispersed state in saturation concentration and successively migrate, controlled by the concentration gradient, first to the adhesive layer and then to the surrounding air. Consequently, this leads to an increasing exhaustion of the attractant layer, which becomes apparent in decreasing active substance release rates. A reliable monitoring throughout the desired period of use is thus not possible either using these arrangements. In addition, the production of these traps is inconvenient because a multi-layered system structure generally necessitates an additional technical effort.
C One-piece Systems with a Monolithic, Attractant-containing Pressure-sensitive Adhesive Layer
The release of attractants in insect-trapping arrangements taught e.g. in JP 53142532 is even more disadvantageous.
The systems described in said document are characterized by an attractant-containing monolithic pressure-sensitive adhesive layer which simultaneously functions as attractant dispenser and trapping surface for the insects. The pressure-sensitive adhesive is generally combined with a carrier, e.g. a sheet of plastic, cardboard or paper, on which said adhesive is attached, and with a protective layer to be removed before use.
From the specifications regarding construction and composition of the pressure-sensitive adhesive layer of the above mentioned arrangements it becomes evident that here, as well, that the release of the active components of the attractants is solely regulated by the concentration gradient.
As is known, such attractant-in-adhesive formulations, in which the attractants are present in free form in the polymer layer, are also subject to time-dependent system exhaustion. A constant and continuous release of the active components can not be achieved with these systems, either.
Finally, it can be stated that in all standard state-of-the-art adhesive insect traps, regardless of their structure and method of operation, the attractant is, at the time of use, present only in a concentration which equals the saturation concentration of the matrix. As these arrangements have no special system-internal mechanisms for the release of attractants, they are, according to the laws of diffusion kinetics and as proven in the practice of pest control, unsuited for constant and continu
Kloczko Malgorzata
Roreger Michael
Jordan Charles T.
Jordan and Hamburg LLP
LTS Lohmann Therapie-Systeme AG
Zerr John W.
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