Diversity of arthropod harbored Mitnan, Thymelaea hirsute, shrub under rain-fed conditions of Habbes valley, Matrouh, Egypt

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Plant Protection Department, Desert Research Center, Mataria, Cairo, Egypt

2 Entomology Department, Faculty of Science, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt

Abstract

Mitnan, Thymelaea hirsute (L.), is one of the abundantly distributed endemic shrubs
in Matrouh's valleys. It acts as an alternative host for a vast range of
arthropod species that may cause great damage for the economic cultivations. So
the present work was carried out to study the arthropod diversity harbored Mitnan
shrub. The collected species were belonging to 8 orders among which, order Hemiptera was the highest
represented one, followed by Thysnoptera, Scorpions, Hymenoptera and
Lepidoptera, respectively. While, orders Diptera, Collembola and
Coleoptera showed the lowest representation. Scouting process using the direct
count method showed the surpassing of both species and individuals of the order
Hemiptera with higher representation of herbivorous individuals than beneficial
ones. Among arthropod species that recovered by sweeping net method,
Hymenopterous ones came on the top of the list, whereas swept individuals
showed that, dipterous species that belonged to family Cecidomyiidae came
firstly by 6 total collected individuals. During the context of this study, the
olive scale insect; Parlatoria oleae (Colvée) was recorded for
the first time on Mitnan. Calculated diversity indices exhibited that,
arthropod community harbored Mitnan shrub had high species richness (14), but as
it was dominated by 3 species so that the diversity of this community is
moderate

Keywords

Egyptian Academic Journal of Biological Sciences. A, Entomology
Volume 6, Issue 3
December 2013
Pages 39-47

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