Mating Status of an Herbivorous Stink Bug Female Affects the Emission of Oviposition-Induced Plant Volatiles Exploited by an Egg Parasitoid

This study contributed to better understanding the host location process by egg parasitoids and laid the basis for the chemical characterization of the elicitor responsible for OIPV emission. Introduction Hymenopteran parasitoids play a key ecological role in many ecosystems and these insects have been recently suggested to be the most species-rich group within the animal kingdom (Forbes et al., 2018). Many parasitoid species are natural enemies of insect pests, which can be used in integrated pest management with the aim of reducing pesticide applications (van Lenteren, 2012; Heimpel and Mills, 2017). One of the key aspects for the success of a parasitoid species as biological control agent is its host finding efficiency: parasitoids can exploit a wide array of cues when foraging for hosts, among which chemical cues convey essential information (Fatouros et al., 2008; Colazza et al., 2014). When parasitoids are far from their hosts, they can use volatile chemicals to narrow-down the area in which hosts are present, whereas contact chemicals become progressively more important once in the close proximity or in contact with the host (Vinson, 1998). Egg parasitoids have evolved the capacity to develop exclusively on host eggs (Godfray, 1994). The ability to kill the pest before the crop feeding stage makes them very attractive in biological pest control as crop damage is kept to a minimum (Tamiru et al., 2015; Fatouros et al., 2016). Due to this adaptation, egg parasit...
Source: Frontiers in Physiology - Category: Physiology Source Type: research