Morphometric analysis of the wing for aphids (Hemiptera: Aphididae) associated with potatoes

Abstract

Aphids are one of the major pests which harm crops worldwide. Among them, in potatoes, they not only give damages to the plants by sucking but also mediates viruses. For controlling these aphids, it is important to identify early migrating aphids, but morphological identification of the winged aphids initially corrected in the potato field is so difficult. This study, therefore, aims to confirm the morphological classification for seven species associated with potatoes based on multivariate morphometric analyses. We used landmarks representing the major point of the fore wings of a total of 140 individuals migrating to potatoes and performed a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), principal component analysis (PCA), and canonical variate analysis (CVA). As a result, it indicated that classification between genera was possible although four out of seven species are included in the same genus as the genus Aphis. In the results of discriminant function analysis, 85.7 % of the 140 individuals used in the analysis were correctly classified. It has been confirmed that the shape of the fore wing of these seven species of aphids migrating to potatoes is different. It is suggestive that those species can be identified using the forewing.