Abstract:We compared the efficiency of the reported primer pair and another version that we redesigned for discriminating tea spiny whitefly, Aleurocanthus camelliae Kanmiya and Kasai, an invasive tea pest in Japan, from another species, A. spiniferus Quaintance , caught on yellow sticky traps in two tea fields in Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan. The reported primer pair enabled us to identify only 5.0-6.7% of individuals captured, whereas we were able to identify 73.3-75.0% of the captured individuals using the redesigned primer pair. These results suggest that the redesigned primer pair is more effective for monitoring the occurrence of A. camelliae in Japanese tea fields.

Abstract:The parasitoid Encarsia smithi comprises two phylogenetic groups. Type I is a strain that was introduced from China in 1925 to control the orange spiny whitefly, Aleurocanthus spiniferus, in Japanese citrus orchards. The other strain, type II, was accidentally introduced and has recently been found in tea fields infested with the tea spiny whitefly, A. camelliae. In this report, we describe our developed rearing method for successive generations of the two strains using A. spiniferus-infested citrus seedlings. In rearing experiments, we found these strains to have different ecological characteristics in terms of number of offspring and emergence pattern.

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