Life tables and demographic statistics of Russian wheat aphid (Hemiptera: Aphididae) reared at different temperatures and on different host plant growth stages

Abstract

Abstract. Laboratory experiments were used to investigate the influences of 25 combinations of temperature and barley plant growth stage (5 × 5 factorial combination of temperature and barley plant growth stage) on the development, survival and reproduction of the Russian wheat aphid (RWA), Diuraphis noxia (Mordvilko). For each of the 25 treatments, the developmental time and nymphal production of 72 RWA individuals were recorded (1800 RWA in total) throughout their entire lifetimes. The collected data were used for analyzing demography, modelling phenology, and simulating population growth of RWA. In this paper, the results of demographic analyses are reported. Specifically, for each treatment, cohort life tables, reproductive heterogeneity tables (parity and birth intervals), and reproductive schedule tables were constructed, and demographic parameters such as intrinsic rate of increase, life-span, fecundity, life table entropy, etc. calculated. Based on these analyses, the most important summary demographic statistics are reported. Using the intrinsic rate of increase (rm) as an example, a procedure is demonstrated that builds a dynamic rm model by applying the Best Subset Regression approach. A more comprehensive (considering reproductive heterogeneity and schedule tables) yet concise (comprising dynamic rm models) demographic model than that based on standard life table analysis alone is presented.

The age of tomato plants affects the development of Macrosiphum euphorbiae (Thomas, 1878) (Hemiptera) colonies

“…The ontogenetic changes in the nutritional quality of the plant and in the defense strategies may explain the greater development of aphid colonies we observed when we infested tomato plants in the pre-flowering stage compared to the flowering stage. Our results confirm the better performance of aphids on young plants previously reported for other aphid-plant systems, as in the case of Diuraphis noxia (Kurdjumov 1913) on barley (Ma & Bechinski, 2009), and Myzus persicae (Sulzer, 1776) and M. euphorbiae on potato (Karley et al, 2002).…”

The biology and demographic parameters of Aedes albopictus in northern peninsular Malaysia

“…Demography is the study of population statistics, including births, deaths, immigration and emigration [11] . A life table depicts the development, survival, and fecundity of a given population and supplies basic data on population increase parameters [12] . Due to the crucial importance of vector demographics on mosquitoborne diseases, many studies have been done addressing the use of life-table models to determine survivorship and population growth potential of mosquitoes [13,14] .…”