Foldscope reveals the beauty of Minute Insect Taxa (Thrips) from IISER Campus, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh

Nov 28, 2018 • 3:55 AM UTC

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Pritam

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Foldscope are becoming very famous to uncover the beauty of microscopic world, we collected some flower to inspect its different parts, but we found some interesting movements of a very tiny slender bodied insect. We dipped the whole flower into absolute alcohol shake mildly for dislodging them from flower. We mounted few of them and put under the fold-scope and we found those insects with very typical wing and when we searched further on internet, we found those insects are known as Thrips.

Fig: 1- Host Plant Thrips are minute insect with cigar-shaped body narrow towards the ends. Their lengths vary from 0.5-14mm depending on species, but average body length is 1mm or less. Thrips belongs to class-Insecta under order Thysanoptera. Their slender body equipped with slender fringed wings and asymmetrical mouth parts. Most of them are herbivorous and take plant saps as their food whereas rest of them are carnivore species who prefers to thrive on other thrips and mites. Nowadays in field of agriculture Thrips are matter of concern because they are good pollinators and destroyers of plant mites as well as important pest for commercial important plants. Their easy resistance to pesticides makes them ideal test models for checking the effectiveness of pesticides.

Fig: 2- Anterior part (Adult)

Fig: 3- Posterior Part (Adult)

Fig: 4- Wings (Adult)

Fig: 5- Wings (Adult, Single Side)

Fig: 6- Anterior Part (Juvenile)

Fig: 7- Whole Body (Juvenile) We saw that fold-scope might be a very effective tool for the taxonomists who is working on Thrips. We clicked some pictures without any established mounting process and pictures by fold-scope is so clear that any expert on this field might be able to distinguish them up to family or genus level. It was only a casual search, but it reveals that fold-scope might be very helpful toolkit for those peoples who are working on this taxon.

Foldscope reveals the beauty of Minute Insect Taxa (Thrips) from IISER Campus, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh

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