Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Journal of Crop Health, cilt.77, sa.2, 2025 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus)
Tomato, Solanum lycopersicum (Solanaceae) is a valuable vegetable for Türkiye, because of its high consumption rate and significant exports. A new tomato pest referred to as Lasioptera sp., which is distributed in Türkiye, Greece, and Romania but could not be identified at the species level till 2019, was finally identified as Lasioptera tomaticola by Yukawa and Harris in 2019. Therefore, this study was carried out in 2017–2018 and 2020–2023 to investigate (i) the distribution of the pest in Türkiye and (ii) the effects of different pruning techniques on the egg-laying behavior of the pest on tomato plants. Additionally, suggestions regarding the control of the pest were discussed in this study. It was determined that L. tomaticola prefers shoots which are completely plucked from the main stem by hand, because of the formation of a large scar tissue. It was found that the wound tissue surface was less in the other two pruning methods and therefore L. tomaticola did not prefer the plants pruned with those methods. One of these methods is “knife pruning”, where the shoot is excised from the main stem with the help of a knife by leaving an axial shoot length of 5 cm, and the second one is “two fingers pruning”, where the shoot is excised from the main stem with two fingers by leaving an axial shoot length of 5 cm. It was observed that even if L. tomaticola laid eggs in the wound tissues in these pruning types, the hatched larvae could not easily reach the main stem.