Cyrtophora citricola as a potential component of an integrated pest management program for citrus in Puerto Rico

Abstract

The trend in agriculture towards reducing pesticide use and fostering ecological sustainability has led to a growing interest in spiders as biological control agents of insect pests due to their ability as intensive predators. Previous studies show that spiders may decrease the pest densities and may level out the densities along the way. Cyrtophora citricola, a spider from the Araneidae family, known for its tent shaped dense web, enables the spider to capture a high number of small to medium sized arthropods, water bugs, flies, wasps, thrips, small moths, small butterflies and mosquitoes. C. citricola is considered a voracious feeder of many of these insect pests. Due to recent reports of C. citricola appearance in Puerto Rico in 2008 this work explores this organism's beneficial impact in agriculture without disregarding its deleterious effects. This study has focused primarily on citrus plants, known to be host plants for C. citricola, and analyze its biological control potential for damaging pests like Diaphorina citri. The latter is a well‐known vector of the severe citrus disease, Huanglongbing or greening disease. The first part of this study has focused on plants/pathogen/antagonists interactions. The availability of D. citri genome sequence and our molecular studies on C. citricola have shed light on these interactions. This understanding will provide an important contribution in the management of HLB on citrus plants.