NEW RECORD AND NEW ASSOCIATIONS OF TWO LEAF MINER PARASITOIDS ( HYMENOPTERA : BRACONIDAE : MICROGASTRINAE ) FROM IRAN

In this study, two braconid species were reared on leaf miners collected from the vicinity of Shahin Dezh, West Azerbaijan province (northwest of Iran). Apanteles corvinus Reinhard was reared on Leucoptera malifoliella (Costa) (Lepidoptera: Lyonetidae) on apple and Protapanteles liparidis (Bouché) was reared on Phyllonorycter populifoliella (Treitschke) on Populus. This is the first report of A. corvinus from Iran and of the new trophic association of P. liparidis with poplar leaf miner, P. populifoliella.


INTRODUCTION
Leaf miners cause damage to varying degrees by consuming the mesophyll of leaves and forming holes and galleries of different shapes in the leaf tissue.Thereby they reduce the photosynthetic capacity of the leaves.These types of pests belong to four holometabolous insect orders: Diptera, Coleoptera, Hymenoptera, and Lepidoptera (Salvo and Valladares, 2007).The list of natural enemies attacking leaf miners is large.It is mainly comprised of hymenopterous parasitoids from the superfamilies Chalcidoidea and Ichneumonoidea.As far as the territory of Iran is concerned, there is lack of information on parasitoids.Recently, data of chalcidoid parasitoid fauna and their trophic associations with the leaf-mining hosts were reported by Baniameri and Mohammadi-Pour (2007), Zargaran et al. (2010) and Sadeghi et al. (2012a, b).

MATERIALS AND METHODS
This study was conducted in the vicinity of Shahin Dezh (south of West Azerbaijan province, Iran) in order to identify parasitoids of some trees' leaf miners.Samplings were performed from April to November 2009.Infested leaves were kept in plastic containers in the Entomology Laboratory of Department of Plant Protection, Agricultural and Natural Resources Research Center of East Azerbaijan, Tabriz.
The reared parasitoids were separated based on morphological characters into two superfamilies (Chalcidoidea and Ichneumonoidea).Chalcidoids, which were the subject of two previously published papers (see Sadeghi et al., 2012a, b), and two braconid species were studied in this research.Identification was made using Telenga (1955), Tobias (1976Tobias ( , 1986)), Nixon (1973), Papp (1984) and Achterberg (2002).The specimens were deposited in the Insect Collection of the Department of Plant Protection, Agricultural and Natural Resources Research Center of East Azerbaijan, Tabriz.Part of the examined material is deposited in the personal collection of the first author.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
In this study, two braconid species were reared from two leaf miner species belonging to the families Gracillariidae and Lyonetidae.
Distribution -This species has been reported from the Palaearctic region (Austria, Belarus, Bulgaria, China, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Korea, Lithuania, Moldova, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, United Kingdom, North Africa) (Yu et al., 2012), Iran (Herard et al., 1979;Fallahzadeh and Saghaei 2010).Introduced in USA.(Burgess, and Crossman, 1929).This is the first report from Iran on Apanteles corvinus, a very important natural enemy of various caterpillars on cultivar plants.The second species, Protapanteles liparidis has already been reared in Iran, but this is the first time it has been reared in trophic association with Phyllonorycter populifoliella (Gracillariidae).Worldwide, the species P. liparidis is known as a parasitoid of the gypsy moth, Lymantria dispar (L.) (Schopf and Steinberger, 1996;Herard et al., 1979).In Iran, we found this species as a gregarious endoparasitoid mainly on 2 nd and 3 rd larval instars.