Demographic suppression and oxidative responses of Tribolium beetles to cold‐plasma and microwave treatment in wheat flour: efficacy‐quality trade‐offs

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BACKGROUND: Non-chemical physical treatments may complement stored-product pest management, but acute mortality alone may underestimate their value when surviving adults reproduce poorly and post-treatment population recovery is suppressed. This study compared atmospheric cold-plasma (CP; 10-20 kV) and microwave (MW; 300-900 W) exposure against sex-balanced adult cohorts of Tribolium castaneum and Tribolium confusum in wheat flour. RESULTS: emergence declined from 199.4 and 163.8 adults in untreated controls to 15.0 and 20.4 after CP and to 5.0 and 1.4 after MW. Both technologies delayed adult pre-oviposition, shortened oviposition and longevity, reduced flour loss, and increased superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), glutathione S-transferase (GST) and malondialdehyde (MDA) in survivors. In independent flour-only assays at 20 min, MW-900 W caused the largest quality changes, increasing peroxide value and free fatty acids while reducing extractable oil and gelatinization enthalpy. Species-specific exploratory principal component analysis (PCA) and canonical discriminant analysis (CDA) of control and 20-min profiles identified dominant treatment gradients. Principal component one (PC1) explained 90.55% and 89.84% of variance, and mean repeated five-fold cross-validation accuracy was 85.5% and 85.9%. CONCLUSION: CP and MW substantially suppressed post-treatment population recovery beyond 24-h mortality. MW gave stronger combined suppression but larger flour-quality changes, whereas CP caused smaller measured quality shifts under the tested laboratory conditions.