When the Beetles Hit the Fan: The IFan-Trap/I, an Inexpensive, Light and Scalable Insect Trap under a ICreative Commons/I License, for Monitoring and Experimental Use

There is a need for cheap, easily deployed traps for insect pest monitoring. Here, we propose the design of an inexpensive fan-trap, under a Creative Commons BY-SA License. Using the blueprint we provide, anyone could laser cut their own traps from a sheet of polypropylene or have this done commercially by a contractor. As they are flat when unfolded, the fan-traps ship easily. When mounted, they are easy to transport in the field in a backpack. The blueprint can also be modified in order to resize the traps to adapt them for different purposes. Monitoring is an important component in pest management, to prevent or mitigate outbreaks of native pests and to check for quarantine organisms. Surveys often rely on trapping, especially when the target species respond to semiochemicals. Many traps are available for this purpose, but they are bulky in most cases, which raises transportation and deployment issues, and they are expensive, which limits the size and accuracy of any network. To overcome these difficulties, entomologists have used recycled material, such as modified plastic bottles, producing cheap and reliable traps but at the cost of recurrent handywork, not necessarily possible for all end-users (e.g., for national plant-protection organizations). These bottle-traps have allowed very large surveys to be conducted, which would have been impossible with standard commercial traps, and we illustrate this approach with a few examples. Here, we present, under a Creative Commons BY-SA License, the blueprint for a fan-trap, a foldable model, laser cut from a sheet of polypropylene, which can rapidly be produced in large numbers in a Fab lab or by a commercial company and could be transported and deployed in the field with very little effort. Our first field comparisons show that fan-traps are as efficient as bottle-traps for some Scolytinae species and we describe two cases where they are being used for monitoring.