Abstract
The red spider mite, O. coffeae, has been known as an important pest of tea, coffee, mango, cotton, jute in the tropical and subtropical regions. O. coffeae infests mango plants grown on Okinawa Island, which was the first record of this species identified in Japan. This paper reports the developmental and reproductive traits of a population collected from tea in Okinawa Island on 1 May 1997. The developmental time declined as temperature increased from 15-32 deg C. The threshold temperature for development and the total effective temperature for the egg-to-egg period were 10 deg C and 232.6 degree days, respectively. The intrinsic rate of natural increase (rm) was 0.186 at 25 deg C, which is close to the value for Tetranychus kanzawai, another serious pest of tea plants, when reared on tea