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Pheromones are scents which are given off by some creatures to communicate with other members of the same species. Moths use pheromones to attract a partner to mate with, often a female moth will release the pheromone into the air and a male moth of the same species will detect this pheromone and follow it to find the female so that they can mate.

Air pollutants, like the fumes that are produced by our cars, also travel through the air and can become mixed up (or ‘react’) with these pheromones. If the pollutants and pheromones react with each other, then the scent of the pheromone could change, making it harder for moths to detect and follow them. My job with the University of Reading is to try and figure out whether this is happening and if so, what are the causes? I use lots of different tools and methods to figure this out! I will give an example of one of these below.

Over the summer, I used a site owned by the University called the FADOE (which stands for Free Air Diesel and Ozone Enrichment…but that’s a bit long winded!). The FADOE is a big field containing 12 rings (imagine a circle made out of metal poles), each ring is 8 meters wide and has one of the following pumped into it: ozone, diesel fumes, a mix of both ozone and diesel fumes or normal air – these are our four conditions. As there are 12 rings in total, and only 4 conditions, there are 3 rings in each condition (so 3 rings have ozone pumped to them, 3 have diesel pumped to them, and so on). In the centre of each ring, I placed some moth traps, these look a bit like little plastic tents with a sticky sheet on the bottom. These traps all have something called a ‘lure’ inside them. Lures are little tubes (often made of rubber) which contain pheromones (in this case, the lures contained moth pheromones). These are used to attract the moths and lure them into the trap – hence the name! I would go to the FADOE every week and check inside my traps, counting the number of moths I could see in each one. Our theory is that if the air pollutants (ozone and diesel) are reacting with the moth pheromones released by the lures, there will be fewer moths in the rings which have the pollutants pumped into them compared to the rings with clean air pumped to them. We hypothesise that there will be fewer moths in the polluted rings because the pheromones change and become harder to detect once they react with the pollutants.