Visual sensory systems of predatory and parasitic arthropods

Abstract

ABSTRACT Efficient prey or host search mechanisms are crucial for natural enemies’ survival and reproduction, and arthropod natural enemies may use chemical, visual, contact, and vibratory stimuli either in single or multiple sensory modes to find appropriate habitat or food source. Visual cues are more precise and are perceived at longer range than other modalities and thus are used by various predators and parasitoids to detect and capture preys or hosts. The presence of compound eyes suggests that vision is an important modality of predatory and parasitic insects. Nevertheless, while olfaction is relatively well studied for many taxa, the vision of those same arthropods has been studied much less frequently. In this review, we summarised the visual sensory systems of both predatory arthropods and parasitoids from recent publications and studies. Many predatory insects such as ladybird beetles are known to use visual cues when foraging in combination with chromatic sensitivity and geometric shape perception. For hymenopteran parasitoids, which have very small eyes, olfactory cues are more important than other modalities. However, most of them have trichromatic vision, and some species can even discriminate shape and size. Predatory and parasitic arthropods do not depend only on vision alone to locate prey or hosts, but rather use multiple cues together. In the future, more studies should be conducted on how visual, olfactory, and contact chemosensory cues are integrated into behavioural decisions for better implementation of biological control.