Lathrolestes luteolator
Lathrolestes luteolator | |
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Scientific classification ![]() | |
Kingdom: | Animalia |
Phylum: | Arthropoda |
Class: | Insecta |
Order: | Hymenoptera |
Family: | Ichneumonidae |
Genus: | Lathrolestes |
Species: | L. luteolator
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Binomial name | |
Lathrolestes luteolator (Gravenhorst, 1829)[1]
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Synonyms[1] | |
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[]
- ^ a b c "Lathrolestes luteolator (Gravenhorst, 1829)". Catalogue of Life. ITIS. Retrieved 6 November 2019.
- ^ 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.
- ^ "Cover illustration" (PDF). Bulletin of the Entomological Society of Canada. 28 (1). 1996.
- ^ a b Forest Health Conditions in Alaska—2003. DIANE Publishing. pp. 57–59. ISBN 978-1-4289-6595-9.
- Ichneumoninae
- Hymenoptera of North America
- Insects used as insect pest control agents
- Insects described in 1829
- Taxa named by Johann Ludwig Christian Gravenhorst