Management of Insect Pests with Semiochemicals: Concepts and Practice

Perhaps the best expression of our intent in organ z ng this gathering is found in the definition of the word colloquy and its derivations. A gathering allowing familiar and informal conversation among colleagues with similar interests was our objective. Our motives were, of course, complex. Our main intent was not, however, to add to the list of books competing for the time of the scientific community at-large. However, while informality was our objective, a lasting document exists in the form of this publication of the presentations forming the skeleton on which we built less formal but meatier communications. We hope you can reconstruct on these bones a perception of the state of the art in the subject at hand. The members of this assemblage are specialists in one or more subdisciplines. Their formal communications are found in texts and journals appropriate to their broader disciplines. Often their friends alone are privy to their less formal thoughts, intuitions, hopes, and especially fears and failures. We hoped by organizing this colloquium to develop familiar and informal conversation among those most interested and active in applying semiochemicals in pest control. That community, like others also shared by Gainesville entomologists, has little or no formal organization or means for assemblage. We proposed on this and future occasions to offer the opportunity to this and similar groups to gather, though we do not presume too much to lead but rather to facilitate conversation.