Encarsia

Identification of Encarsia View in CoL agona’s Bemisia host by molecular diagnostics

Morphological identification of Bemisia tabaci- complex species has always been extremely challenging in some cases has been made possible only very recently ( MacLeod et al. 2022). In the present study total of eight candidate parasitised Bemisia 3rd/4th instar pupae, sequencing of successfully partial cox1 sequences from four samples indicated they were parasitised by E. agona based on

HISTORY identity (Supplemental Data 08–11; Polaszek et al. 2025) to the cox1 gene of our assembled draft E mitogenomes. Overall partial cox1 sequence identity (473bp-616bp) between E. agona individuals (from Bemisia tabaci SSA 1 host pupae) and the HTS assembled cox1 gene from the mitogenome ranged 99.2% to 100% based on pairwise nucleotide distance ( p -dist) estimates. Species identification of Bemisia pupae based on sequence analysis indicated that these pupae belonged to B. tabaci (Supplemental Data 12–15; Polaszek et al. 2025). Studies are ongoing to determine whether Bemisia SSA 1 is conspecific with B. manihoti Frappa ( Madagascar) and/or Bemisia gossypiperda var Ghesquière (D.R. Congo), currently synonyms of B. tabaci ( Mound and Halsey, 1978) .