Buffalo Mountain Mealybugs: Michael Kosztarab’s Scale Insects

Summary: Buffalo Mountain mealybugs, Country Roads icons in 2016 and Michael Kosztarab’s scale insects since 1993, live in Floyd County, southwestern Virginia.

Buffalo Mountain is the only place in the world where Buffalo Mountain mealybugs (Puto kosztarabi) are found; Buffalo Mountain overlook, Floyd County, southwestern Virginia; Monday, Oct. 13, 2014, 15:51:13: daveynin, CC BY 2.0 Generic, via Flickr

Buffalo Mountain mealybugs are Country Roads icons in the May/June 2016 issue of Blue Ridge Country magazine and Michael Kosztarab’s scale insects native to habitat niches unique to southwestern Virginia’s Floyd County.

Su Clauson-Wicker, magazine contributing editor, brings up the rare arthropod in her article Your Chance to Meet the Mealybug in conjunction with Buffalo Mountain Nature Preserve. The bedbug-like adult female Buffalo Mountain mealybugs and the wasp-like adult males count among the rare animals and the rare plants on the 3,972-foot (1,210.66-meter) summit. They do not have members of related species closer than Texas or of the same species within nine similar habitats in North Carolina and in Virginia.

Buffalo Mountain mealybug presences in planned and wild scale insect gardens elicit reactions other than consternation since local feeding chains and food webs control their numbers.

Buffalo Mountain mealybugs rely on Danthonia spicata, known commonly as June-grass, poverty grass or white oat-grass, for food and shelter: Matthew C. Perry/US Geological Survey, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Native grasses and wildflowers and rare grasses and wildflowers respectively flourish on Buffalo Mountain’s south face and in magnesium-rich seeps at the natural area preserve’s base.

Danthonia spicata ([Étienne] Danthoine’s spike), commonly called June-grass, poverty grass or white oat-grass, gives food and shelter to Buffalo Mountain mealybugs in wild scale insect gardens. Spartina alterniflora (alternate-flowering cord), commonly called saltwater cord-grass, hosts Buffalo Mountain mealybugs that are raised for scientific research in such planned scale insect gardens as greenhouses. Danthonia spicata is a 4-inch- to 2-foot- (2.54- to 60.96-centimeter-) tall perennial that flowers from May through July, grows in clumps and has curly-leafed, year-round basal tufts.

Spartina alterniflora juggles 8-foot (2.44-meter), shaggy looks with flowers July through September alongside the southeastern United States’ creeks, ditches, mud flats, protected beaches and salt marshes.

Spartina alterniflora, known commonly as saltwater cord-grass, serve as host plants for Buffalo Mountain mealybugs raised in such scientific research settings as greenhouses; Tuesday, July 30, 2013, 11:06:33: Will Pollard (billmiky), CC BY ND 2.0 Generic, via Flickr

Adult female Buffalo Mountain mealybugs keep their host grasses non-invasive by piercing plant exteriors and sucking out the internal sap that circulates nutrients and photosynthetic sugars. Excretion of the excess sugars in sucked-out sap as snow-like, sticky, sweet, wax-threaded, white honeydew leads predators to eat the grass, the honeydew and the mealybug.

The females’ honeydew and the males’ mate-searching flights every August may be the only indicators of Buffalo Mountain mealybugs in planned and wild scale insect gardens. Michael Kosztarab, entomologist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, notes that honeydew is the clue behind his discovery of Buffalo Mountain mealybugs Aug. 4, 1992.

The discovery occasions the scientific name Puto kosztarabi (Kosztarab’s mealybug) by Douglass R. Miller and Gary L. Miller, United States Department of Agriculture entomologists, in 1993.

adult female Puto kosztarabi, labeled illustration; after Figure 1, page 11, Douglass R. Miller and Gary L. Miller, "A New Species of Puto and a Preliminary Analysis of the Phylogenetic Position of the Puto Group Within the Coccoidea (Homoptera: Pseudococcidae)," Jeffersoniana: Contributions From the Virginia Museum of Natural History, number 4 (Oct. 30, 1993), pages 1-35: via USDA Identification Technology Program (ITP)

The Miller article puts the worldwide tally for Puto species at one easterner and 21 westerners inside, and 36 outside, the borders of the United States.

California, New Mexico, Texas and Utah in the United States, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Venezuela qualify as homelands for America’s Puto species. Twenty-nine species in Caribbean, Central, North and South America reflect worldwide divisions: conifer-eating males with blunt-tipped, short reproductive organs and grass-preying males with long, two-tipped parts. Fifty specimens, from America and from Europe, that represent four conifer-consumers and 13 grass-feeders show Buffalo Mountain mealybug separateness in planned and wild scale insect gardens.

Buffalo Mountain mealybugs turn up as exceptions for gardeners frantically assembling horticultural oils, insecticidal soaps and predatory hoverflies, lacewings, ladybugs and wasps against scale insect pests.

Buffalo Mountain Natural Area Preserve map; Buffalo Mountain mealybugs claim glades near the mountaintop as their only home habitat: J. Albert Bowden II (jalbertbowdenii), CC BY 2.0 Generic, via Flickr

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

Buffalo Mountain overlook, Floyd County, southwestern Virginia; Monday, Oct. 13, 2014, 15:51:13: daveynin, CC BY 2.0 Generic, via Flickr @ https://www.flickr.com/photos/daveynin/15854574575/

Buffalo Mountain mealybugs rely on Danthonia spicata, known commonly as June-grass, poverty grass or white oat-grass, for food and shelter: Matthew C. Perry/US Geological Survey, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Danthonia_spicata.jpg; via USGS Eastern Ecological Science Center @ https://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/herbarium/danthonia_spicata.htm

Spartina alterniflora, known commonly as saltwater cord-grass, serve as host plants for Buffalo Mountain mealybugs raised in such scientific research settings as greenhouses; Tuesday, July 30, 2013, 11:06:33: Will Pollard (billmiky), CC BY ND 2.0 Generic, via Flickr @ https://www.flickr.com/photos/billmiky/9401413729/

adult female Puto kosztarabi, labeled illustration; after Figure 1, page 11, Douglass R. Miller and Gary L. Miller, "A New Species of Puto and a Preliminary Analysis of the Phylogenetic Position of the Puto Group Within the Coccoidea (Homoptera: Pseudococcidae)," Jeffersoniana: Contributions From the Virginia Museum of Natural History, number 4 (Oct. 30, 1993), pages 1-35: via USDA Identification Technology Program (ITP) @ https://idtools.org/scales/index.cfm?packageID=1112&entityID=3382; (former URL @ http://idtools.org/id/scales/gallery_index.php?page=7#prettyPhoto[media]/50/); Miller and Miller, via Virginia Museum of Natural History @ https://www.vmnh.net/content/vmnh/uploads/PDFs/research_and_collections/jeffersoniana/jeffersoniana_number_4.pdf; Miller and Miller, via ScaleNet @ http://scalenet.info/references/MillerMi1993b/

Buffalo Mountain Natural Area Preserve map; Buffalo Mountain mealybugs claim glades near the mountaintop as their only home habitat: J. Albert Bowden II (jalbertbowdenii), CC BY 2.0 Generic, via Flickr @ https://www.flickr.com/photos/jalbertbowdenii/14950137049/

For further information:

Blue Ridge Country @BRCmagazine. 1 June 2016. "There's only one place in the world to find these little guys, and that's our very own Buffalo Mountain Nature ..." Twitter.
Available @ https://twitter.com/BRCmagazine/status/737973414300778496

Clauson-Wicker, Su. 28 April 2016. “Your Chance to Meet the Mealybug.” BlueRidgeCountry.com > Newsstand > Country Roads.
Available @ http://blueridgecountry.com/newsstand/country-roads/your-chance-to-meet-the-mealybug/

Clauson-Wicker, Su. May/June 2016. “Your Chance to Meet the Mealybug.” Blue Ridge Country vol. 29, nos. 5/6.

Miller, D.; A. Rung; G. Parikh; G. Venable; A.J. Redford; G.A. Evans; R.J. Gill. 2014. Scale Insects. Edition 2. Fort Collins CO: USDA APHIS Identification Technology Program (ITP).
Available @ http://idtools.org/id/scales

Miller, Douglass R.; and Miller, Gary L. 30 October 1993. “A New Species of PUTO and a Preliminary Analysis of the Phylogenetic Position of the Puto Group within the Coccoidea (Homoptera: Pseudococcidae).” Jeffersoniana: Contributions from the Virginia Museum of Natural History Number 4, pp. 1-35.
Available @ http://www.vmnh.net/jeffersoniana