Predation, phytophagy and character state confusion among North American species of the genus Leptothrips (Thysanoptera: Phlaeothripinae)

Abstract

Difficulties are discussed of specimen preparation, of character state variation, and of species recognition in the genus Lep-tothrips, also the extent to which some of the species are phytophagous rather than predatory. An identification key is pro-vided to 15 Leptothrips species from North America. Nine species described by Johansen (1987) are newly placed into synonymy, a further unrecognisable species is based on a single deformed specimen, and L. texcosensis Johansen-Naime et al. (2017) is transferred to the genus Haplothrips.