Telenomus gregalis Rajmohana sp. n. (Hymenoptera: Scelionidae), a gregarious egg parasitoid of the jujube lappet moth, Streblote siva (Lefèbvre) (Lepidoptera: Lasiocampidae) from India

ABSTRACT

Streblote siva (Lefèbvre) (Lepidoptera: Lasiocampidae) is a polyphagous pest of many economically important crops, including moringa (Moringa oleifera Lamarck). The present study reports, for the first time, a species of Telenomus Haliday (Hymenoptera: Scelionidae) as an egg parasitoid of S. siva. The rearing data revealed that this egg parasitoid was gregarious in nature, and upon further taxonomic examination it was found that the parasitoid represented an undescribed species of Telenomus. In this study, an mt COI DNA barcode was generated for this new species from India. Additionally, with the mt COI gene data and the published 28S sequence data concatenated, a two-gene phylogenetic tree was constructed to ascertain the placement of this new species within the genus Telenomus.

http://www.zoobank.org/urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:7F97EBD0087C4324A601-EE8194E8E577

KEYWORDS:

• moringa
• new species

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the Director, Zoological Survey of India, for providing the necessary facilities. KPD thanks the Officer-in-Charge, ZSI, WRC, Pune, for support and encouragement. KR is thankful to the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard, for the award of an Ernst Mayr Travel Grant (2007), for a visit to BMNH, London, to study the type specimens of Oriental Telenominae. VS and RD are thankful to the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and SP is thankful to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), India, for providing fellowship support. The phylogenetic analysis was supported by the DST-SERB project (CRG/2021/005047). Thanks are also due to Dr S.K. Jalali and Dr Ojha Rakshit for helping in generating the barcode. VS, SP and RD are grateful to their labmates for their encouragement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Department of Science and Technology, Ministry of Science and Technology, India; the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change.