Centre for Plant Health Management

Many sap beetle species are known agricultural pests of field and stored products. Sap beetles are often only considered to be minor pests, but the presence of large numbers of sap beetles on a host plant can prove to be of economic importance in terms of crop damage caused by the feeding beetles. The impact on crop value is primarily due to the contamination by beetle adults and larvae of products ready for sale. Sap beetles are also associated with cactus pear in South Africa. Through research conducted by INCroP, three species, i.e. Carpophilus hemipterus, C. ligneus and Urophorus humeralis, have been recorded to occur on plants in the central Free Sate region. The cosmopolitan C. hemipterus was quantitatively dominant throughout all the surveys. It is well-known that sap beetles generally follow olfactory cues of decaying plant material to gain access to, amongst other, sugar nutrients. In this study C. hemipterus bred prolifically in fermenting fruit and decaying cladodes, with the adults sheltering under the decaying, moist cladodes that have dropped from the plant. World-wide adults of C. hemipterus are also known to vector diseases on stone fruit and figs and in this study it was also the case on cactus pear. Eight fungal pathogen genera, seven of which are known to cause fruit rot, were isolated from C. hemipterus specimens sampled at a single locality. Especially noteworthy are field observations that have given rise to the suspicion that sap beetle adults also gain access to healthy, ripe cactus pear fruit via the spine- and glochid-bearing areoles. Studies on this phenomenon are on-going.

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