Uttarakhand is an alpine state which has many districts relying on fruit crops for economic purposes. This study has been conducted in three districts of Uttarakhand namely, Chamoli, Uttarkashi and Tehri where the softskinned fruit orchards were targeted for collection of drosophilids during different stages of ripening fruit. One of the sites sampled was taken as control site where fruit orchards were not present but had only few fruiting trees with mixed vegetation. With this study, total of ten species has been collected extensively and there seems to be a pattern in the presence of these drosophilids. At the ripening stage of fruits, the species that were present in the sites were Drosophila suzukii, Drosophila subpulchrella, Drosophila punjabiensis. It indicates that these species are attracted toward ripening fruits and later their ovipositor was also observed and were confirmed as serrated ones. On the contrary, the drosophilids present at ripen stage were Drosophila nepalensis, Zaprionus indianus and Drosophila
takahashii and these species were also present in control site. Interestingly, Drosophila melanogaster were only present when the fruits were plucked and there were only piles of rotten fruits. The control site, on the other hand, had a few additional species that were not found in the fruit orchards. Later study of their ovipositors also suggested that
these species might not harm the ripening fruits as they may not act as primary pests.
Hirtodrosophila fascipennis (Okada, 1967) and its closely related species, Hirtodrosophila pellucidipennis Bhardwaj, Khan & Fartyal, sp. nov., have been found in sympatry from Western Himalaya, India, and the latter is described here with detailed morphological comparison to the former. The most distinctive characteristic is that, while H. fascipennis has a distinct pattern of pigmentation on its wings, the new species lacks such wing pigmentation.
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