The genus Lygus includes over 40 species of plant-feeding insects in the family Miridae. The term lygus bug is used for any member of genus Lygus.
Species
At one time, nearly 200 species were classified as genus
Lygus, but most of those have since been reclassified into new or existing genera. Species within this genus include:
[ Catalogue of life][ Fauna europaea]
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The tarnished plant bug ( Lygus lineolaris) feeds on over half of all commercially grown crop plants, but favors cotton plant, alfalfa, , prunus, and pinophyta seedlings. This bug can be found across North America, from northern Canada to southern Mexico.
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The western tarnished plant bug ( Lygus hesperus) is a very serious pest of cotton plant, strawberry, and seed crops such as alfalfa.
[Henry, Thomas J., and Richard C. Froeschner, eds. (1988), Catalog of the Heteroptera, or True Bugs, of Canada and the Continental United States]
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The European tarnished plant bug ( Lygus rugulipennis) is distributed throughout Europe, where it will feed on over 400 types of crop plant from peach to wheat to lettuce.
[ British Bugs]
Description
These insects appear as small oval creatures. Adult lygus are approximately 3 mm wide and 6 mm long, colored anything in a range from pale green to reddish brown or black. The bugs can be solid shaded or mottled, and have a distinctive triangle or V-shape on their backs. Adults are capable of
flight, and will often thus escape when approached. Nymphs are wingless, and being light green in color, are often mistaken for aphids. However, lygus nymphs have harder exoskeletons, are typically more active, gain spots as they age, and lack aphid cornicles.7
Biology
Lygus bugs are known for their destructive feeding habits - they puncture plant tissues with their piercing mouthparts, and feed by sucking
sap. Both the physical injury and the plant's own reaction to the bugs' saliva cause damage to the plant. The females insert their eggs directly into the plant tissues using piercing
, and the newly emerged nymphs are voracious consumers of plant tissue juices. Signs that a plant has been attacked by lygus bugs include discoloration, deformation of shoots and stems, curling of leaves, and lesions on the plant tissues.
Economic importance
The more well-known lygus bugs are those that have
agriculture impacts. Some lygus bugs are very serious agricultural pests.
[ General Lygus Information]
Some methods of biological pest control have proved useful against lygus bugs. For example, of the genus Peristenus are parasite of lygus bugs; an adult wasp will inject an egg into a lygus nymph, and once the egg hatches the wasp's larva will consume the nymph from the inside out.
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