Controle de formigas cortadeiras com uso de óleos essenciais: uma revisão

Abstract

In Brazil, reforestation and monoculture practices are strongly impacted by leaf-cutting ants, which cause severe damage while affecting different stages of plant development and are distributed on a large scale. In this way, the use of pesticides occurs mainly with the use of synthetic products, which infer numerous damages to environmental and human health due to the accumulation and high persistence in the environment over time, in addition to selective pressures that potentiate the persistence of pests. . Essential oils are emerging today as an economically profitable method of environmental control and beneficial to the environment, as they have insecticidal and repellent factors in their constitution capable of dealing with the impacts of leaf-cutting ants. Thus, the present work aimed to investigate the use of essential oils as a defensive to the attack of leaf-cutting ants, through a literature review. Throughout its structure, a contextualization about the importance of the research is developed, followed by deepening in the understanding of the ants of the Atta and Acromyrmex genera, with explanations about their way of life and behaviors, determined at the individual and colony level, as well as, plant species that, through their essential oils, infer impacts on the lives of these ants, with explanations about the experiments and results. In addition, other information is presented about essential oils, their performance in the current market, chemical constitution, extraction means and current applications. Finally, in view of the theoretical framework exposed, as final considerations, we understand the lack of information about the chemical constituents that actually interact and act as active principles capable of repelling the pests in question, as well as the lack of information about the specific response. of ants in the face of exposure to oils, expressing results in terms of repellency, toxicity, colony abandonment and antifungal potential on the symbiont fungus, which mutually introduce new perspectives to the field of pesticides and elucidate potential gaps to be investigated.