The impact of pests and diseases on agricultural crops has been amplified due to global environmental changes, resulting in an estimated adverse effect 1.4 trillion dollars, which is approximately 5% the world's gross domestic product. Research was conducted various species parasitic entomophages, such as Aphidius matricaria Hal, gifuensis Ashm, Lysiphlebus japonica Tokawa, ervi fabarum Marsh, ...

Resource consumption often increases with greater consumer biodiversity. This could result either from complementarity among consumers or the inclusion of particular key species, and it is often difficult to differentiate between these two mechanisms. We exploited a simple plant mutation (reduced production of surface waxes) to alter foraging within a community of aphid predators, and thus perh...

Morphological variation of Aphidius ervi Haliday (Hymenoptera: Braconidae) 1 associated to different aphid hosts 2 3 Cinthya M. Villegas , Vladimir Žikić, Saša S. Stanković, Sebastián A. Ortiz-Martínez, Ainara 4 Peñalver-Cruzand Blas Lavandero * 5 6 1: Laboratorio de Interacciones Insecto-Planta, Instituto de Ciencias Biológicas, Universidad de 7 Talca, Talca, Chile. 8 2: Department of Biology ...

Heritable symbionts are common in insects with many contributing to host defence. Hamiltonella defensa is a facultative, bacterial symbiont of the pea aphid, Acyrthosiphon pisum that provides protection against the endoparasitoid wasp Aphidius ervi Protection levels vary among strains of H. defensa that are differentially infected by bacteriophages named APSEs. By contrast, little is known abou...

The molecular mechanisms that allow generalist parasitoids to exploit many, often very distinct hosts are practically unknown. The wasp Aphidius ervi, a generalist koinobiont parasitoid of aphids, was introduced from Europe into Chile in the late 1970s to control agriculturally important aphid species. A recent study showed significant differences in host preference and host acceptance (infecti...

Natural enemies are important ecological and evolutionary forces, and heritable variation in resistance to enemies is a prerequisite for adaptive responses of populations. Such variation in resistance has been previously documented for pea aphids (Acyrthosiphon pisum) attacked by the parasitoid wasp Aphidius ervi. Although the variation was presumed to reflect genotypic differences among the ap...

An experiment was conducted to test whether parasitoid resistance within a single clonal line of pea aphid (Acyrthosiphon pisum) might increase after exposure to the parasitoid wasp Aphidius ervi. Any change in resistance was expected to occur through an increase in the density of protective symbiotic bacteria rather than genetic change within the aphid or the bacterial symbiont. Six aphid line...