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Up until now, on a scale of 1 to 10, practical pest control
management ranks about a “1″ with regard to the availability of information on
scale insects in Iran! Yet even the most basic tool for pest control management
in Iran has been unavailable jeopardizing crop yields. Dr. Masumeh Moghaddam of
the Iranian Research Institute of Plant Protection, Tehran has changed that by
publishing the first ever detailed annotated checklist of the scale insects of
Iran.
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This publication features 275 insect species from 13
families of the Coccoidea superfamily of the order Homoptera. Most of these
parasitic insects are known to impart serious economic damage to crops making
the identification and control of them very important to agricultural
interests.
The Coccoidea family is made up of 49 families of roughly
8,000 species. Scale insects permanently attach to plant parts, pierce them, envelope
themselves in a waxy coating for defense and suck the sap and moisture right
out of the plant. This ultimately degrades or even destroys the plant. The waxy
coating makes it difficult for many insecticides to penetrate their shell. They
will reproduce and stack one on the other to resemble the scales of a fish or
reptile. Most varieties of these
parasites emerge from their eggs free moving. They totter around for an
attractive spot onto which they latch. Once secure, they lose their legs and
hunker down.
The new Iran specific study individually lists the locally
identified scale insect species, their regional data and host plants. It is
anticipated that this information will help Iranian growers gain stronger area knowledge
of the Coccoidea family’s plant intrusion for resulting improvements in crop
health. The new study is published in Zookeys.
Read more at: Pensoft, The
Bug Guide
Photo by GEF
Small Grants Programme.
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