Lathrolestes luteolator

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Lathrolestes luteolator
Scientific classification edit
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Hymenoptera
Family: Ichneumonidae
Genus: Lathrolestes
Species:
L. luteolator
Binomial name
Lathrolestes luteolator
Synonyms[1]
  • L. caliroae (Rohwer, 1915)
  • L. eriocampoides (Rohwer, 1915)
  • L. gorskii (Ratzeburg, 1852)
  • L. mentalis (Davis, 1897)
  • L. nigriventris (Ashmead, 1902)
  • L. scutellatus (Ashmead, 1890)
  • L. suburbis (Davis, 1897)

Lathrolestes luteolator is a species of wasp in the family Ichneumonidae.[1] it is native to North America and is a parasitoid of various species of sawfly larvae.[2] In the 1990s, it started to parasitise the larvae of the invasive amber-marked birch leaf miner in Alberta. When this pest spread to Alaska, the wasp was used in biological pest control.

Ecology[]

Like other parasitic wasps in the family Ichneumonidae, the adult female L. luteolator uses its ovipositor to lay eggs inside the body of its prey, usually the larval stage of a sawfly larva, often a leaf miner. When the eggs hatch, the carnivorous larvae live in and consume the body of their host. Various sawfly larvae are attacked including the red oak leaf miner ().[3] In Alberta, the host is the "pear slug" (Caliroa cerasi), which is not a mollusc but the larva of a sawfly.[2]

However, in Alberta in the early 1990s, the wasp adopted a new host and started parasitising the amber-marked birch leaf miner (Profenusa thomsoni), an invasive species that had appeared in the province twenty years earlier and become a major pest of birch trees (Betula). A dramatic collapse in populations of the leaf miner followed, and numbers remain low, seemingly kept under control by the parasitic wasp.[4]

By 2003 the range of the amber-marked birch leaf miner had extended into Alaska, and it was spreading, first throughout the Anchorage Basin, and later into the Eagle River watershed and the Matanuska-Susitna Valley and southwards to Bird Ridge, causing serious defoliation of birch trees. A biological control program of the pest using Lathrolestes luteolator was initiated in 2004.[4]

References[]

  1. ^ a b c "Lathrolestes luteolator (Gravenhorst, 1829)". Catalogue of Life. ITIS. Retrieved 6 November 2019.
  2. ^ a b Digweed, S.C.; McQueen, R.L.; Spence, J.R. & Langor, D.W. (2003). Biological control of the ambermarked birch leafminer, Profenusa thomsoni (Hymenoptera, Tenthredinidae), in Alberta. Canadian Forest Services. ISBN 0-662-34882-6.
  3. ^ "Cover illustration" (PDF). Bulletin of the Entomological Society of Canada. 28 (1). 1996.
  4. ^ a b Forest Health Conditions in Alaska—2003. DIANE Publishing. pp. 57–59. ISBN 978-1-4289-6595-9.
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