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    • Rights: The University of Waikato
    Published 14 April 2009 Referencing Hub media
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    Learn more about the life cycle of scale insects1. Researcher Rosa Henderson, of Landcare Research NZ Ltd, describes the development of these tiny creatures.

    Transcript

    ROSA HENDERSON
    With scale insect females, they are called eggs, nymphs and final instar nymph2, but the final instar nymph is a neotenic or larval-form adult. She never grows into something like a beetle or a fly. The first instar is usually the crawler stage, and that has legs and its dispersal3. Some scale insects lose their legs at the second instar so therefore they are fixed to their plant. The little males go through the first two instars the same as the females, and then they go into the non-feeding stages, which is firstly called a pre-pupa and then a pupa4, and then they emerge as an insect-looking creature, but they have no mouth parts, so they don’t feed and only live a few days. Just long enough to mate with a female and that's it. The scale insects are producing the honeydew5 until they are mature adults. The adult females do not feed any more and so they are out of that system, but they are continually producing young, which set up and settle on to the trees and start producing honeydew straight away and through their 3 or 4 life stages are producing honeydew.

    Acknowledgements:
    Landcare Research New Zealand Limited
    Maree Reveley

    1. scale insects: A family of insects that generally feed directly on the sap produced by plants.
    2. nymph: An immature form of some animals, like cockroaches, crickets, cicadas and mantises. It differs from a larval form in that it looks like the adult form but without wings. It also doesn’t go through a pupa stage.
    3. dispersal: Movement of an organism to a new place. Seeds in plants and spores in ferns and fungi help dispersal by floating on the wind to new habitats. This allows stationary species to colonise new areas.
    4. pupa: An insect in the inactive stage of development (when it is not feeding) intermediate between larva and adult.
    5. honeydew: A sweet syrup produced by scale insects living in beech forests. Used by birds, fungi and insects as a food source.
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      scale insects

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      2. A family of insects that generally feed directly on the sap produced by plants.

      pupa

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      3. An insect in the inactive stage of development (when it is not feeding) intermediate between larva and adult.

      nymph

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      4. An immature form of some animals, like cockroaches, crickets, cicadas and mantises. It differs from a larval form in that it looks like the adult form but without wings. It also doesn’t go through a pupa stage.

      honeydew

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      5. A sweet syrup produced by scale insects living in beech forests. Used by birds, fungi and insects as a food source.

      dispersal

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      6. Movement of an organism to a new place. Seeds in plants and spores in ferns and fungi help dispersal by floating on the wind to new habitats. This allows stationary species to colonise new areas.

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