The past and the present of Indian Psylloidea (Hemiptera: Sternorrhyncha)

Abstract

Close to 120 species of Psylloidea are known from India. Ram Nath Mathur's, Psyllidae of the Indian Subcontinent (1975) remains the relevant document for Indian Psylloidea today, although much updating is necessary. That a few papers on scattered themes pertaining to Indian Psylloidea have appeared post Mathur volume is notable. Interest in the Psylloidea is growing all over the world, because of their fascinating dimensions of host relations. Many of them remain committed to one host species and a few to have diversified onto related taxa. Their role in vectoring plant pathogenic microbes is another relevant dimension. Under these circumstances, in this paper, we highlight the slow, but gradual growth of interest in the Indian Psylloidea, which commenced with the papers of a French insect collector Francois Lethierrry and a British chemist-entomologist George Buckton, who described the free living Diaphorina guttulata and the gall inducing Psylla cistellata (renamed as Apsylla cistellata by Crawford in 1912) and Phacopteron lentiginosum, respectively, from India. The present paper also briefly recaps the milestone events in the study of psylloids and the evolution of various nomenclatural terms. The present paper alerts those interested in pursuing Psylloidea in India that they need to verify details in the freely available online file Psyl'list maintained by David Ouvrard of the London Natural History Museum, since we found that inconsistency and inaccuracy prevail in some of the recently published literature on the Indian Psylloidea.