Morphological and molecular characterization of cryptic and invasive thrips species in Central India

Thrips is one of the important sucking pests infesting vegetable crops causing huge economic damage directly by sucking plant sap and indirectly by transmitting orthotospoviruses in the world as well as in India. Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh are very important vegetable producing states of India but lacking sound knowledge on incidence and distribution pattern, virus transmission efficiencies of the economically important thrips species occurring on vegetables. The identification of existence of different cryptic species of thrips within a genus is very difficult to distinguish using morphological parameters. Therefore, intensive sampling of thrips species was done on three important solanaceous vegetable crops (tomato, chilli and brinjal) in these two states and were subjected to morphological and molecular diagnostic techniques. Results revealed that nine distinct species of thrips belonging to six genera were known to occur on vegetables in these states. Interestingly, we report three cryptic species of thrips, Haplothrips ganglbaueri Schmutz and Thrips parvispinus (Karny) in Chhattisgarh, and Haplothrips gowdeyi (Franklin) in Madhya Pradesh for the first time. The other six species recorded were Thrips palmi Karny, Frankliniella schuttzei Trybom, Thrips florum Schmutz, Bathrips melanicornis, Thrips hawaiiensis (Morgan), and Scirtothrips dorsalis Hood. The most dominant species was found to be S. dorsalis, followed by T. palmi. The current study reports distribution of nine distinct thrips species including three cryptic species and an invasive species, T. parvispinus which is spreading very fast in central India.