FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS; NATURAL ENEMIES AND POLLINATORS IN VIRGINIA CUCURBIT PRODUCTION. James M. Wilson & Thomas P. Kuhar, Department of Entomology, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061. Cucurbit production in Virginia provides the commonwealth with melons, pumpkins, summer squashes, and cucumbers, all of which are dependent upon adequate pollination for fruit set and development. Growers ...

Amitu8 bennetti Viggiani & Evans is a recently discovered parasitoid of whiteflies in the genus Bemisia, including the serious pests Bemisa tabaci (Gennadius) and Bemisia argentifolii Bellows & PelTing. The reproductive biology and the host searching behavior of A. bennetti was studied in the laboratory, using B, a'rgentifolii as a host. The developmental time for A. bennetti from egg to adult ...

Ascoviruses are insect-specific large DNA viruses that mainly infect noctuid larvae, and are transmitted by parasitoids in the fields. Heliothis virescens ascovirus 3h (HvAV-3h) has been recently isolated from Spodoptera exigua, without parasitoid vector identified previously. Here we report that Microplitis similis, a solitary endoparasitoid wasp, could transmit HvAV-3h between S. exigua larva...

A 5-mo survey for fruit feeding Lepidoptera attacking Hass and non-Hass avocados (Persea americana Miller [Lauraceae]) was conducted in Guatemala from 1 November 2006 to 1 April 2007. In total, 6,740 fruit were collected from 22 different areas in Guatemala. Eight species of Lepidoptera, of which at least two are species new to science, were reared from avocado fruit. Reared Lepidoptera were Am...

Microplitis mediator (Haliday) is a solitary endoparasitoid of larvae of the cotton bollworm, Helicoverpa armigera (Hübner) and the oriental armyworm, Mythimna = Leucania separata (Walker). The preference and suitability of different instars of M. separata for M. mediator were determined under laboratory conditions at a constant temperature of 26 ± 1 C, 65 ± 5% RH and L14:D10 photoperiod. The s...

Eight species of parasitic wasps were bred from various stages of five species of hesperiids viz. Thoressa evershedi (Evans), Pelopidas mathias (Fabricius), Udaspes folus (Cramer), Borbo cinnara (Wallace) and Caltoris sp. inhabiting Western Ghats, Kerala, India. One new species, Dolichogenidea kunhi Gupta & Kalesh, is described and illustrated from Kerala, India, and its relationship with close...

BACKGROUND Habituation, a form of non-associative learning, has several well-defined characteristics that apply to a wide range of physiological and behavioral responses in many organisms. In classic patch time allocation models, habituation is considered to be a major mechanistic component of parasitoid behavioral strategies. However, parasitoid behavioral responses to host cues have not previ...

Parasitoid fitness is influenced by the ability to overcome host defense strategies and by the ability of parasitoid females to select high-quality host individuals. When females are unable to differentiate among hosts, their fitness will decrease with an increasing abundance of resistant hosts. To understand the effect of mixed host populations on female fitness, it is therefore necessary to i...

Eggs of three strains of the cynipid parasitoid Leptopilina heterotoma and a Tunisian strain (G317) of L. boulardi are not encapsulated by hemocytes of Drosophila melanogaster hosts, but the eggs of a Congolese strain (L104) of L. boulardi are encapsulated. To determine the reason for the difference in host response against the parasitoid eggs, lamellocytes (hemocytes that encapsulate foreign o...

Psix striaticeps (Dodd) is an egg-parasitoid wasp previously known only from the Old World. We report this species twelve counties in Florida, which are first records Western Hemisphere. It was collected yellow cylinder traps and reared eggs of three stink bug species: Nezara viridula L., Chinavia marginata (Palisot de Beauvois), Piezodorus guildinii (Westwood). A COI barcode analysis found a 1...