Superparasitism behavior and host discrimination of Campoletis chlorideae (Ichneumonidae: Hymenoptera) toward Mythimna separata (Noctuidae: Lepidoptera).

The oriental army worm, Mythimna separata Walker (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae), was adopted as a host to keep Campoletis chlorideae Uchida (Hymenoptera: Ichneumonidae) populations in the laboratory, because it can be mass reared. However, wasp cocoon production in this system via single parasitism was not satisfactory. To improve the rearing efficiency of C. chlorideae on M. separata, we studied the effects of superparasitism on the offspring production of C. chlorideae, as well as the host discrimination ability of the adult wasps in the laboratory. The results showed that, compared with single parasitism, both double and quintuple parasitism significantly increased C. chlorideae cocoon production in M. separata without a significant effect on emergence, weight, or sex ratio of adult wasps at the P < 0.05 level. Host selection experiments suggested that C. chlorideae preferred to lay eggs on unparasitized hosts rather than freshly parasitized hosts but could distinguish neither the 24-h postparasitization hosts from the unparasitized hosts nor the freshly self-parasitized hosts from the conspecifically parasitized hosts. No-choice behavior tests indicated that C. chlorideae took significantly longer time to accept the freshly parasitized hosts containing more than two eggs compared with the unparasitized hosts. In the end, superparasitism behavior and its application in the mass rearing of this endoparasitoid are discussed.