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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]

The attraction of two parasitoid wasps, Allotropa subclavata (Muesebeck) and Anagyrus fujikona (Tachikawa), to the sex pheromone of Japanese mealybug, Planococcus kraunhiae (Kuwana), was investigated using a pheromone trap and a blank trap under natural and mating disruption conditions by sex pheromones. Although A. fujikona was caught by the pheromone trap in the control plot, this parasitoid was not caught by the blank trap in the control plot or either trap in the mating disruption plot. On the other hand, A. subclavata was caught by both traps equally in control and mating disruption plots. The prevalence of A. fujikona caught by the pheromone trap was similar to that of P. kraunhiae male adults. Additionally, the peaks of caught A. fujikona corresponded to the prediction of when second and third instar larvae of P. kraunhiae would appear. These results suggest that A. fujikona was attracted to the sex pheromone, and that the prevalence of this parasitoid could be monitored by a pheromone trap of P. kraunhiae. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]