THE COCCID.E OF CUBA.* 



J. S. HOUSER, 



Ohio Agricultural Experiment Statiofi. 



The material upon which this paper is based was procured 

 by the writer during the years 1908 and 1909, while in the 

 employ of the Cuban government as assistant in the Depart- 

 ment of Vegetable Pathology of the Central Agricultural Exper- 

 iment Station. A portion of it consists of duplicates presented 

 him from the collection of the department and the remainder 

 was collected by him personally. 



The department collection had been accumulated from 

 specimens sent in for determination and from miscellaneous lots 

 brought in at various times by members of the staff. No care- 

 ful, systematic collecting had been attempted, except during 

 the time which Mr. Wm. T. Home, chief of the department, 

 had spent investigating the troubles of Citrus fruits of the 

 Island and during his work on the bud-rot of cocoanuts. Both 

 of these studies extended over a wide range of territory and, as 

 a sharp lookout was maintained constantly for scale insects, the 

 Coccid fauna of the various Citrus plants and of the cocoanut 

 must be fairly well represented in the collection. 



The collecting by the writer was done mainly in the vicinity 

 of Santiago de las Vegas and of Havana. The latter locality 

 offered exceptional opportunities because of two botanical 

 gardens which were placed at his disposal — La Jardin Botanica 

 de la Universidad de Habana and La Jardin Botanica del 

 Institute de la Segunda Ensenada de Cuba. Not only was the 

 work of collecting facilitated by finding in a relatively small 

 area a large number of named host plants, but it seemed little 

 had been done on the part of the gardeners by way of combating 

 the Coccids and, as a result, the field was an unusually rich one. 



Two ends were sought in the collecting: To secure as many 

 species as possible and to enlarge the list of known Coccid host- 

 plants. Immediately after it was collected, the material was 

 dried in a slightly warmed oven and treated with flake 

 naphthalene, the former to prevent development of molds and 

 the latter to repel insects. Both operations are important in 

 tropical and semi-tropical Coccid collecting, the former being 

 particularly so if the season of collecting is wet. Moreover, 



* Contributions from the Department of Systematic Entomology, Cornell 

 University, 1911. 



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