Museum Workers Are Making Male Moths Fall for Each Other to Save Their Exhibits

If you've got a major moth infestation on your hands, there's a more subtle way of dealing with it than killing them. How about duping the males of the species into liking other males?

For the past four years, the exhibits in London's Natural History Museum have been subject to clothes moth attacks. In a report in the Independent, Armando Mendex, the museum's quarantine facility manager, explained how the pesky creatures can cause problems for museums with textile displays and infest the fur of dead animals on display at the museum.

As a defense measure, Mendex this year inaugurated what's been dubbed a "pheromone dispersal" system. In simple terms, this basically involves coating male moths in female pheromones, tricking other male moths into believing they're female.

Museums workers laid bait containing female pheromones around the museum. "The bait, made up of wax-based micropowder containing female moth pheromones was laid out in the museum as bait to attract the male moths," explained Georgina Donovan, the communications manager at tech company Exosect, which made the bait.

"When the male moths comes into contact with the tablet, particles of the powder stick to him and he's coated in female pheromones that attract other males," said Donovan. "This confuses the population and takes the male moths out of the mating cycle."

Moth larvae do the most damage as they chomp their way through the materials they find themselves in when they're born. However, if you block the mating cycle, you bring down the moth population overall.

Disrupting moth mating cycles is actually a well-known practice. In the agricultural sector, farmers also use pheromone disruption techniques. Other methods include "habituation" and "masking", where male moths are bombarded with so much of the female moths' pheromones that they become blasé to it. Donovan told me that one of the advantages of their system was that you didn't need to use vast amounts of chemicals for the procedure to be effective.

Moths typically only live a few weeks, so by encouraging them to gender bend, you're essentially taking out a sizeable chunk of time from what's already a short lifespan. "It's like a birth control for moths," said Donovan.