Liothrips

Mound, Laurence A. & Morris, David C., 2007, A new thrips pest of Myoporum cultivars in California, in a new genus of leaf-galling Australian Phlaeothripidae (Thysanoptera), Zootaxa 1495, pp. 35-45 : 37

The Liothrips -lineage of Phlaeothripinae

Within the Liothrips -lineage the main genus, Liothrips Uzel , is the largest genus of Thysanoptera , with 290 species currently listed worldwide (Mound 2007). However, the genus is not clearly defined from other genera, and only five species are listed from Australia. A related genus, Teuchothrips Hood , includes 30 species, of which 21 are from Australia, five from New Caledonia, three from Indonesia, and one from India. This genus is not clearly defined from Liothrips , and many of the described species in these two genera are known from very few specimens, with little information on host relationships or intraspecific structural variation. Recent examination of the original material of the 21 Australian species listed in Teuchothrips has indicated that they cannot all be considered con-generic. Moreover, field work across Australia in the past 10 years has produced many similar-looking species in this “ Teuchothrips -complex”, often associated with leaf deformation on particular species of native Australian plants.

Formal taxonomic work on these leaf-feeding Australian thrips is dependent on further field studies, partly to establish host associations more firmly, but also to rediscover several of the un-recognisable species that were described briefly by Girault during the 1920’s and 1930’s ( Gordh et al., 1979). A further related genus is Akainothrips Mound from Australia. This genus involves 33 species, all of which are associated only with the phyllodes of Acacia species ( Crespi et al., 2004), although none is known to induce distortion on these plants. The leaf-damaging Myoporum thrips is here considered to be related to Akainothrips , but because of biological, structural and molecular differences it is described within a new genus, together with three other Australian species of which two are currently listed under Teuchothrips . One of these three species is common in galled leaves of Myoporum insulare around south eastern Australia, but the other two are associated with leaf distortion on Asteraceae shrubs: one on the genus Ozothamnus (or Cassinia ) in Australia and New Zealand, and the other on Olearia lirata in south eastern Australia.