Diversity and status of herbivorous arthropods on bamboos with a revised taxonomic list of Philippine bamboo pests

Field surveys and collections of arthropods associated with bamboos were conducted in as many areas as possible around the Philippines. These yielded hundreds of specimens that were examined and identified to generate data for taxonomic diversity and basic information for pest management. The diversity of Philippine bamboos provides special habitats to a wide array of herbivorous arthropods that includes 131 species, composed of 124 insects and seven mites. Of these, 80 were actually collected and/or observed during this study. In terms of number of species representing each order or family of insects and mites, the order Hemiptera (bugs and their allies) is the most diverse with 44 species, followed by Coleoptera (beetles) with 27, Thysanoptera (thrips) with 16, Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies) with 15, and the Hymenoptera (ants) with 12 species. Therefore, planting of bamboos in a way promotes or supports terrestrial arthropod biodiversity. With these insects forming part of the food items of insectivorous arthropods and vertebrate wildlife, the support can be interpreted as extending to terrestrial biodiversity in general. For pest management, data gathered in these study indicate that the number of herbivorous arthropods on bamboo that may potentially become pests does not present immediate danger to bamboo plants as long as the present balance of ecosystem components and processes, primarily the existing set of natural population regulation processes, is maintained. A checklist of arthropod pests of the Philippine bamboos, largely based on the five-year actual field survey, and supplemented further by subsequent field work, examination of museum collections and review of published literature, is presented. The list is limited to those with specimen documentations and far from complete. It is likely that new records and even new species will be discovered with further studies.