Activity of Adult Whiteflies (Homoptera: Aleyrodidae) Within Plantings of Different Cotton Strains and Cultivars as Determined by Sticky-Trap Catches

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Adults of the sweetpotato whitefly, Bemisia tabaci (Gennadius), and the bandedwinged whitefly, Trialeurodes abutilonea (Haldeman), were collected with sticky traps from replicated field plots of a number of different breeding stocks and cultivars of cotton, Gossypium hirsutum L., grown in three tests in Arizona and California. These cottons carried different combinations of the mutant characters nectariless, okra leaf, smoothleaf, and semismoothleaf. Many more B. tabaci than T. abutilonea were caught. None of the breeding stocks or test cultivars had fewer whiteflies than the cultivar ‘Deltapine 61;’ ‘Deltapine 62,’ however, attracted fewer B. tabaci. Smoothleaf in ‘AET-5’ background (‘AET-5’ is a breeding stock having resistance to the pink bollworm, Pectinophora gossypiella [Saunders]) had significantly fewer adults of both whitefly species than did pubescent-leaf plants. The nectariless and okra-leaf characters showed no significant differences, except that more bandedwinged whiteflies used okra leaf than its normal-leaf counterpart. Semismoothleaf yielded mixed results, suggesting that this character might be of some value for reducing whitefly populations if incorporated into an appropriate genetic background. Both okra leaf and nectariless okra leaf conferred some susceptibility to whiteflies in certain genetic backgrounds. This is a cause for concern because these two mutant characters impart resistance to pink bollworms.