Diagnoses and re-description of Coccinellid beetles, Stethorus rani Kapur and Stethorus aptus Kapur (Coleoptera: Coccine
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE
Diagnoses and re-description of Coccinellid beetles, Stethorus rani Kapur and Stethorus aptus Kapur (Coleoptera: Coccinellidae) preying on tea red spider mite Oligonychus coffeae Nietner (Acari: Tetranychidae) Azariah Babu 1 & Vattakandy Jasin Rahman 2 V. V. Ramamurthy 3
&
Shaloo Ayri 3 & Amsalingam Roobakkumar 4 & J. Poorani 5 &
Received: 23 August 2019 / Accepted: 12 March 2020 # African Association of Insect Scientists 2020
Abstract Stethorus aptus Kapur and Stethorus rani Kapur are two important predatory ladybird beetles preying on red spider mite, Oligonychus coffeae Nietner infesting tea in South India. This study re-describes these two predatory beetles since it was found that the original descriptions were scanty. In this study, an attempt has been made on the diagnoses with a detailed description which is supplemented with current terminology, illustrations, coloured images, morphometrics and SEM images of both species. The morphometrics done in the study deals with the length and width of the egg, larvae, pupa and adult of both male and female. Body colour, setae, clypeus, eyes, antennae, scutellum, elytron, abdomen, legs and genitalia were re-described. The present study of the surface morphology with SEM puts forward the differences observed in the size of the punctures on pronotum of two species and the proportion of elytral length versus width as additional diagnostic characters of significance. Keywords Stethorus aptus . Stethorus rani . Morphometrics . Re-description
Introduction Lady bird beetles from the genus, Stethorus are widely distributed in world and about 86 species have been
* Vattakandy Jasin Rahman [email protected] 1
Tea Research Association, North Bengal Regional R&D Centre, Nagrakata, Jalpaiguri District, West Bengal 735 225, India
2
Department of Zoology, T.K.M. College of Arts and Science, Kollam, Kerala 691 005, India
3
Network Project on Insect Biosystematics, Indian Institute of Agricultural Research, Delhi 110 012, India
4
Division of Entomology, Central Coffee Research Institute, Coffee Research Station, Chikamagaluru, Karnataka 577 117, India
5
National Bureau of Agriculturally Important Insects, Bengaluru, Karnataka 560 024, India
totally recorded (Li et al. 2013). Stethorus aptus Kapur was identified for the first time in India as a predator on the red spider mite (RSM), Oligonychus coffeae Nietner infesting tea (Camellia sinensis (L.) O. Kuntze) by Babu (2012) and on the European red mite, Panonychus ulmi Koch by Govindasamy and Khursheed (2018). The life cycle and predatory potential of S. aptus on O. coffeae (Barua et al. 2013, 2018) and Stethorus rani Kapur on Tetranychus urticae Koch (Amala and Yadav 2013) were studied. Literature survey revealed many gaps in the diagnosis at the species level of these two beetles due to the sketchy and incomplete description of their taxonomic characters. Since original descriptions given by Kapur (1948) are scanty and need to be updated and augmented with morphometrics and illustrations
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