Comparative developmental and reproductive biology of geographical populations from two cryptic species in Brontispa longissima (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae)

Abstract

Brontispa longissima is a serious pest of the coconut palm Cocos nucifera, presumed to have originated in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. It recently invaded Southeast and East Asia, where outbreaks have been reported. Mitochondrial DNA analysis reveals two cryptic species in B. longissima: one is distributed over a wide area including Asia and the Pacific region (the Asian clade) and the other in a limited area in the Pacific region (the Pacific clade). Recent invasions and outbreaks have been reported only from the area where the Asian clade has been found, suggesting that this clade has become a pest in Asia. To infer if the Asian clade has the ability to establish, spread and outbreak in novel habitats more effectively than the Pacific clade, we compared life‐history traits between the two populations of different clades. The net reproduction rate (R0) was 130.0 and 94.0, the mean length of a generation (T) was 57.7 and 54.7 days, and the intrinsic rate of natural increase (r) was 0.084 and 0.083 per day for the population from Ishigaki Island, Japan (ISH) (the Asian clade) and for the population from Papua New Guinea (PNG) (the Pacific clade), respectively. Although the difference in r was little, the simulated population growth showed that the ISH population can be 1.6 times larger than that of the PNG after ten generations. The rapid population growth of the Asian clade would be partly responsible for its establishment, spread and frequent outbreaks in Asia.

Unique clade of alphaproteobacterial endosymbionts induces complete cytoplasmic incompatibility in the coconut beetle

“…Infection by Wolbachia decreases the fecundity of host insects, and releasing transinfected insects with low fecundity into the field may suppress the pest population (29)(30)(31). In B. longissima, egg production is higher in the Asian clade than in the Pacific clade (32). In this study, elimination of the previously unidentified bacterial symbiont did not influence the short-term (7 d) egg production of this beetle (Fig.…”

Transcriptome sequencing and analysis of the coconut leaf beetle, Brontispa longissima

“…To develop alternative control methods it is critical to obtain a considerable scientific knowledge of this pest (Zhu et al, 2013a). Although its biological and ecological characteristics have been widely reported (Zhong et al, 2005;Takano et al, 2012Takano et al, , 2013, it has been little investigated at the molecular level. By August 20, 2014 only 264 B. longissima nucleotide sequences had been deposited in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) database.…”