Insects · Hemiptera · Miridae

North American Tarnished Plant Bug

Lygus lineolaris

Not Evaluated

It has not yet been assessed against the IUCN criteria. See full glossary

A small brown bug with a pale triangle on its back, extraordinarily polyphagous: it attacks hundreds of species of cultivated and wild plants. It pierces shoots, flowers and young fruit and injects a saliva that destroys the tissues.

Size

up to 0.7 cm

Diet

Herbivore

Feeds mainly on plants.

Social structure

Solitary

Lives and hunts alone, joining others only to breed.

Sighting difficulty

Unknown

GrasslandHerbivore Solitary Insect Grassland

2countries

Fun facts

The damage is caused not by the sap it takes but by its saliva, loaded with enzymes that kill the cells around the puncture and make the shoot abort or the fruit grow deformed.
It overwinters as an adult among the leaf litter and weeds of the field margins and colonises the crop as soon as it sprouts, which makes managing the margins a key measure.
It is one of the costliest pests of cotton and strawberries in North America.
It is one of the most polyphagous agricultural pests in North America: it has been recorded on more than three hundred species of cultivated and wild plants.
Its damage is out of all proportion to its size because it does not feed on just any tissue: it preferentially pierces meristems and flower buds, and injects enzymes that kill developing tissue. One small puncture ruins an entire bud.
In cotton it causes the flower buds to drop, and in strawberries it deforms the fruit: the so-called cat-faced strawberries are the damage of this bug.
It rose to prominence just as the boll weevil was brought under control: once the blanket treatments against that pest disappeared, this bug became the main cotton pest in the southern United States.
It has developed resistance to several groups of insecticides, and its control relies more and more on managing the margin vegetation where it shelters between crops.