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1 October 2013 Plant-Mediated Changes in the Feeding Behavior of an Invasive Whitefly
Baiming Liu, Evan L. Preisser, Xiaoguo Jiao, Huipeng Pan, Wen Xie, Shaoli Wang, Qingjun Wu, Youjun Zhang
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Abstract

The invasive whitefly Bemisia tabaci (Gennadius) is a worldwide pest of agricultural crops that feeds on a wide variety of host plants. Although host plant preference is known to vary among B. tabaci biotypes, far less is known about the potential for intraspecific divergence caused by long-term isolation on a single species of host plant. We tested the hypothesis that multigenerational isolation of B. tabaci B, a biotype that has been well-established in China for nearly two decades, on three different host plants would lead to population-level divergence in feeding behaviors. We used individuals from a cabbage-feeding (Brassica oleracea L.) population of B. tabaci B to create three populations reared exclusively on B. oleracea, cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.), or tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum Mill.) for >80 generations. We then used electrical penetration graph techniques to investigate the feeding behavior of the three B. tabaci populations on each of the three host plants (nine total treatments). Across all three host plants, the cabbage-specific population equaled or exceeded the performance of the cucumber-specific (CuSP) and tomato-specific (ToSP) populations. Strikingly, neither CuSP nor ToSP ever had the best feeding performance on their natal hosts. Our results support the hypothesis that feeding differentiation has occurred, but we found no evidence that these changes increased the feeding performance of either CuSP or ToSP. Although confirming that rapid interpopulation divergence is possible, our findings nonetheless suggest that this differentiation did not yield highly adapted populations that might pose problems for future efforts at pest management.

© 2013 Entomological Society of America
Baiming Liu, Evan L. Preisser, Xiaoguo Jiao, Huipeng Pan, Wen Xie, Shaoli Wang, Qingjun Wu, and Youjun Zhang "Plant-Mediated Changes in the Feeding Behavior of an Invasive Whitefly," Environmental Entomology 42(5), 980-986, (1 October 2013). https://doi.org/10.1603/EN13071
Received: 16 March 2013; Accepted: 1 July 2013; Published: 1 October 2013
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KEYWORDS
Bemisia tabaci B
differentiation
electrical penetration graph
feeding behavior
host plant isolation
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