the mealybug fauna of southern iran (systan & baluchestan, hormozgan, bushehr, khuzeztan and fars provinces) is unknown to many coccidologists. in this paper, 17 mealybug species from the south of iran with their host plants are reported.maconellicoccus hirsutus (green), nipaecoccus viridis (newstead) and planococcus ficus (signoret) are the important pests and ferrisia virgata (cockerell), dys...

Stable endosymbiosis of a bacterium into a host cell promotes cellular and genomic complexity. The mealybug Planococcus citri has two bacterial endosymbionts with an unusual nested arrangement: the γ-proteobacterium Moranella endobia lives in the cytoplasm of the β-proteobacterium Tremblaya princeps These two bacteria, along with genes horizontally transferred from other bacteria to the P. citr...

Although density-dependent benefits to hemipterans from ant tending have been measured many times, few studies have focused on integrated effects such as interactions between ant tending, natural enemy density, and hemipteran density. In this study, we tested whether the invasive mealybug Phenacoccus solenopsis is affected by tending by ghost ants (Tapinoma melanocephalum), the presence of para...

Scale insects (Hemiptera: Sternorrhyncha: Coccoidea) are a speciose and morphologically specialized group of plant-feeding bugs in which evolutionary relationships and thus higher classification are controversial. Sequences derived from nuclear small-subunit ribosomal DNA were used to generate a preliminary molecular phylogeny for the Coccoidea based on 39 species representing 14 putative famil...