MORPHOMETRIC IDENTIFICATION OF STEM BORERS Diatraea saccharalis AND Diatraea busckella (Lepidoptera: Crambidae) IN SUGARCANE CROPS (Saccharum officinarum) IN CALDAS DEPARTMENT, COLOMBIA

Abstract

The sugarcane (Saccharum sp.), of great importance for being one of the most traditional rural agroindustries in Latin America and the Caribbean, as part of the agricultural systems, is vulnerable to increases or reductions in the incidence of pests associated with extreme events of climate change, such as prolonged droughts, hurricanes, heavy and out of season rains, among others, contributing to the increase losses in agricultural production, which forces farmers to make excessive expenditures on pesticides that generally fail to solve the issue. (Vazquez, 2011). The main pest belongs to the Diatraea complex (Vargas et al., 2013; Gallego et al., 1996), a larval stage perforator habit. Different field evaluations have revealed the presence of a species that had not been reported in sugarcane crops, Diatraea busckella, and to corroborate the finding, a method of identification was needed whose advantage was to be quick and also low cost, in this sense, geometric morphometry is a mathematical tool with biological basis (Bookstein, 1991), which allows to decompose the variation resulting from the physiology of individuals of the most stable individuals of the population, product of the genetic component. CLIC (Collecting Landmarks for Identification and Characterization) was used for identification, with reference to the previous right wing (De La Riva et al., 2001; Belen et al., 2004; Schachter-Broide et al., 2004; Dvorak et al., 2006; Soto Vivas et al., 2007). Wing morphometry was performed using generalized Procrustes analysis (Rohlf and Marcus, 1993). The analysis clearly differentiated between D. busckella and D. saccharalis, eliminating the environmental factors that could generate some level of error, being considered a support tool that validates the molecular biology processes for the identification of organisms.