A fortuitous find: a unique haplotype of Ooencyrtus nezarae Ishii (Encyrtidae: Encyrtinae) discovered in Florida

Abstract

The adventive arrival of biological control agents circumvents the regulatory process by introducing exotic species to control invasive pests and is generally followed by post hoc risk evaluation. The bean plataspid, Megacopta cribraria (Fabricius) (Hemiptera: Plataspidae), is an invasive pest of leguminous crops in the south-eastern United States that was eventually followed by two parasitoid wasps from its range in the eastern hemisphere, Paratelenomus saccharalis (Dodd) (Scelionidae) and Ooencyrtus nezarae Ishii (Encyrtidae). In North Central Florida, sentinel egg masses, intended to capture Paratelenomus saccharalis, instead yielded Ooencyrtus nezarae, which was previously known only from Alabama (Ademokoya et al. 2018). Two generations of O. nezarae were subsequently reared in the laboratory. COI sequences from the Florida population of O. nezarae differed by 1.3% from the Alabama population and the presence of a different haplotype suggests the possibility of a separate introduction. Laboratory parasitism rates, sex ratios, morphology, molecular diagnosis and implications for agriculture are discussed.

A maximalist approach to the systematics of a biological control agent: Gryon aetherium Talamas, sp. nov. (Hymenoptera, Scelionidae)

“…Many surprising discoveries of regulatory and agro-economic consequence surely await to be found as these data accumulate and are analyzed at a global scale. The case of G. aetherium presented here illustrates, once again, the utility of COI barcodes for detecting and tracking the geographic spread of biological control agents under evaluation (Ganjisaffar et al 2018;Stahl et al 2019;Goltz et al 2020). We suspect that there are many similar, yet undetected, cases to be found among already available barcode data.…”

Effects of Food Source Availability, Host Egg:Parasitoid Ratios, and Host Exposure Times on the Developmental Biology of Megacopta cribraria Egg Parasitoids

“…After the host exposure period ended, parasitized eggs were held for 14–17 days to allow time for O. nezarae and P. saccharalis adults to emerge [ 29 , 30 ] (personal observation). After the holding period, the final proportion of parasitized M. cribraria eggs to emerged M. cribraria nymphs, the number of emerged parasitoids, the sex ratio of emerged parasitoids, and the proportion of unascribed eggs (host eggs did not result in emergence) to the total number of eggs per egg mass were recorded.…”