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The parasitoid Encarsia smithi comprises two phylogeneticgroups. Type I is a strain that was introduced from China in 1925 to controlthe orange spiny whitefly, Aleurocanthus spiniferus, in Japanese citrusorchards. The other strain, type II, was accidentally introduced andhas recently been found in tea fields infested with the tea spiny whitefly,A. camelliae. In this report, we describe our developed rearing methodfor successive generations of the two strains using A. spiniferus-infestedcitrus seedlings. In rearing experiments, we found these strains to havedifferent ecological characteristics in terms of number of offspring andemergence pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We compared the efficiency of the reported primer pair and another version that we redesigned for discriminating tea spiny whitefly, Aleurocanthus camelliae Kanmiya and Kasai, an invasive tea pest in Japan, from another species, A. spiniferus(Quaintance), caught on yellow sticky traps in two tea fields in Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan. The reported primer pair enabled us to identify only 5.0-6.7% of individuals captured, whereas we were able to identify 73.3-75.0% of the captured individuals using the redesigned primer pair. These results suggest that the redesigned primer pair is more effective for monitoring the occurrence of A. camelliae in Japanese tea fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]