1932 ] 
Notes on the Genus Dysdercus 
113 
NOTES ON THE GENUS DYSDERCUS (HEMIPTERA- 
HETEROPTERA) IN TRINIDAD, B. W. I. 
By E. 0. Pearson 
The work on which this paper is based was carried out 
partly at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture, 
Trinidad, between February and June, 1930, and partly at 
the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, 
during the present year. The author is indebted to these 
two institutions and also to the United States National 
Museum for access to their collections, and to Mr. W. E. 
China, of the British Museum, for assistance and advice 
with regard to the identification of the species. 
The first record of the genus from Trinidad is contained 
in Ballou’s (1906) paper on the West Indian Cotton Stain- 
ers, in which he describes a new species, Dysdercus howardi, 
and its variety, D. howardi var. minor, from material col- 
lected in the island. 
D. howardi var. minor has recently been synonomized 
with D. ruficollis L. by Hussey (1929) and in the same 
paper D. andrese L. is recorded from the island. The latter 
error is apparently based on a reference by Myers (1927) 
to this species in the Trinidad Mountains of Cuba. Apart 
from a number of papers dealing with the life history and 
bionomics of the genus from an economic point of view 
(Guppy and Thornton, 1911; Urich, 1916; Withycombe, 
1924; Hewison and Symond, 1928) no further work has 
been done on the nature of the species occurring in the 
island. 
There are, in point of fact, four well marked species in 
the island and in view of the fact that in certain cases 
these species have been inadequately described and that in 
every case an examination of the material in the collections 
mentioned above has shown the distribution of these spe- 
