Description of an Australian endemic species of Trioza (Hemiptera: Triozidae) pest of the endemic tea tree, Melaleuca alternifolia (Myrtaceae).

Francesco Martoni,Mark J Blacket,Sean Michael Prager

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0257031

Francesco Martoni, Mark J Blacket + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0257031

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Sep 22, 2021
Citations: 3	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Agriculture Victoria, AgriBio

Abstract

Psyllids, also known as jumping plant lice, are phloem feeding Hemiptera that often show a strict species-specific relationship with their host plants. When psyllid-plant associations involve economically important crops, this may lead to the recognition of a psyllid species as an agricultural or horticultural pest. The Australian endemic tea tree, Melaleuca alternifolia (Maiden & Betche) Cheel., has been used for more than a century to extract essential oils and, long before that, as a traditional medicine by Indigenous Australian people. Recently, a triozid species has been found to damage the new growth of tea trees both in Queensland and New South Wales, raising interest around this previously undocumented pest. Furthermore, adults of the same species were also collected from Citrus plantations, leading to potential false-positive records of the exotic pest Trioza erytreae (Del Guercio 1918), the African Citrus psyllid. Here we describe for the first time Trioza melaleucae Martoni sp. nov. providing information on its distribution, host plant associations and phylogenetic relationships to other Trioza species. This work enables both morphological and molecular identification of this new species, allowing it to be recognized and distinguished for the first time from exotic pests as well as other Australian native psyllids. Furthermore, the haplotype network analysis presented here suggests a close relationship between Trioza melaleucae and the other Myrtaceae-feeding Trioza spp. from Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan.

Highlights

The Australian psyllid fauna includes more than 400 species [1, 2] belonging to six of the seven families of Psylloidea worldwide [3]
Holotypes and paratypes were deposited in the Victorian Agriculture Insect Collection (VAIC), in Melbourne (Victoria, Australia), while additional paratypes were deposited at the Australian National Insect Collection (ANIC), in Canberra (Australian Capital Territory, Australia)
T. melaleucae’s nymphs cause leaf curling, wilting and pitting of foliage when feeding on juvenile leaves, which are important for the tea tree industry

Summary

Introduction

The Australian psyllid fauna includes more than 400 species [1, 2] belonging to six of the seven families of Psylloidea worldwide [3]. In Australia, the family Triozidae includes more than 70 species, both native and adventive, belonging to a total of 10 genera [1, 2, 9]. Within the Triozidae, the genus Trioza includes 11 described species [1, 10,11,12]. No Trioza species have been recorded in the literature associated with the plant genus Melaleuca L. No Trioza species have been recorded in the literature associated with the plant genus Melaleuca L. (Myrtaceae); recently an undetermined triozid psylloid was found to be damaging tea tree plants in eastern Australia [13]

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