Abstract
This comprehensive account of the mites injurious to economic plants opens with a general introduction to the Acari in which their significance to man, their phylogeny, classification, morphology and biology are described in general terms. In the five following chapters, the authors review the population ecology of phytophagous mites (including discussion of agricultural practices that influence it), the history of the chemical control of such mites and mite resistance to acaricides, the principles regulating the chemical control of plant-feeding mites (including pest management), the biological enemies of mites (including virus diseases, predatory mites and spiders and insect predators of mites) and mites and plant diseases (including local injuries or galls, the injection of systemic or persistent toxins and the transmission of virus or other agents of disease). A chapter presenting general information on the Tetranychidae follows, with sections on systematics, morphology, collection and preparation of specimens, biology, plant injury and food-plant relations. The next four are systematic reviews of the injurious Tetranychid mites (with descriptions of genera and species and information on distribution, bionomics and food-plants of mites in the two subfamilies Bryobiinae and Tetranychinae), the Tenuipalpidae (with a general section on systematics and more detailed consideration of the injurious species), the Tarsonemidae (treated similarly), and the Tydeidae, Tuckerellidae, Pyemotidae, Penthaleidae, Astigmata and Cryptostigmata. A general chapter on the Eriophyoidea follows, in which the numerous topics discussed include morphology, food-plant relations, types of abnormalities caused, bionomics and the collection and preservation of specimens, and this leads to a systematic review of the injurious species of the three families Nalepellidae [or Phytoptidae], Eriophyidae and Rhyncaphytoptidae. Much of the information on the biology of the Eriophyidae is new, and there is a new key to all the genera recognised. With regard to the Eriophyids that infest grape vines, as to which some nomenclatural confusion has prevailed [cf. RAE/A 60, 2275, etc.], the authors take the view that the rust mite is Calepitrimerus vitis (Nal.), of which the deutogynes are often listed as Phyllocoptes vitis Nal., whereas the grape bud and grape erineum mite is the one up to the present called Eriophyes vitis (Pgst.), which has three strains referred to (from the type of injury caused) as the bud strain, the erineum strain and the leaf-curling strain, it has no deutogynes. The authors place this species in the genus Colomerus, but their use of this name and also of the names Eriophyes (to replace Aceria) and Phytoptus (for what is usually termed Eriophyes) [cf. preceding abstract] is subject to question [and is currently under consideration by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature]