page_title: Planococcus citri
section_title: Biology
hierarchical_section_title: Planococcus citri / Biology
caption_attribution_description: English: Planococcus citri on Tagetes sp., Mobile. AL, USA
context_page_description: Planococcus citri, commonly known as the citrus mealybug, is a species of mealybugs native to Asia. It has been introduced to the rest of the world, including Europe, the Americas, and Oceania, as an agricultural pest. It is associated with citrus, but it attacks a wide range of crop plants, ornamental plants, and wild flora.
context_section_description: The longevity of the adult depends on temperature, but while females live for several weeks, males live fewer than three days in adult form. During this time, the male does not feed. It takes flight with its single pair of wings and seeks females. The female spends its longer lifetime feeding and producing eggs. Most other aspects of the life cycle depend on temperature, as well, including egg mortality, nymph mortality, rate of development, sex ratio, fecundity, and the length of the egg-laying period.
  During mating, the citrus mealybug is known to engage in "triple coitus"; a female may copulate with two males at the same time, and a third male may at least make attempts to join the process. Males spend the one or two days of their adult lives mating, and have been observed achieving copulation with up to 23 females, with an average of about nine.
  There are usually several generations per year. The mealybug is most common in spring and summer, its populations fluctuating according to temperature and available host plants. Peak abundance is noted in early summer in Florida citrus. Mealybugs infesting plants in the constant conditions of greenhouses have stable, steadily reproducing populations all year.
  All mealybug species investigated so far have endosymbionts: symbiotic bacteria that live inside their bodies and synthesize useful compounds such as amino acids that the insect can utilize. Most mealybugs examined contain the betaproteobacterium Tremblaya princeps (Candidatus Tremblaya princeps). Other bacterial taxa have recently been found in mealybugs, as well. The citrus mealybug has a nested endosymbiosis. Its resident T. princeps contain their own endosymbionts, the gammaproteobacterium Moranella endobia (Candidatus Moranella endobia). This "matryoshka" nested arrangement of a bacterium inside a bacterium inside an insect has been compared to the structure of a cell. T. princeps has almost no metabolic functions except for the production of amino acids, having lost the genes for most other life functions. It relies on M. endobia for energy, and is even unable to reproduce without it. T. princeps attracted attention when genetic analysis revealed that it has the smallest genome of any bacterium studied thus far. At 139 kilo-base pairs, it has only about 120 genes, which helps to explain why it cannot function without its endosymbiont.
caption: Infesting a marigold
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