''Bathycoelia thalassina'' is a species of African

shield bugs The Pentatomoidea are a superfamily of insects in the Heteroptera suborder of the Hemiptera order. As Hemiptera, they share a common arrangement of sucking mouthparts. The roughly 7000 species under Pentatomoidea are divided into 21 families (16 ...

in the subfamily

Pentatominae Pentatominae is a subfamily of Pentatomidae, a family of shield bugs. This subfamily is the largest one within the Pentatomidae, having 4937 species classified in 938 genera. Species in this subfamily are phytophages and several of them are consid ...

Description

''B. thalassina'' is a large, mostly green species of shield bug with a length of 20–21 mm. The flattened lateral border of the abdomen (connexivum) has a black pattern more or less black with round pale spot in middle of each segment. The

pronotum The prothorax is the foremost of the three segments in the thorax of an insect, and bears the first pair of legs. Its principal sclerites (exoskeletal plates) are the pronotum (dorsal), the prosternum (ventral), and the propleuron (lateral) on ea ...

has very dense puncturing, the surface of the disk therefore rugose and opaque.North Dakota State University: ''Bathycoelia'' Amyot & Serville, 1843 (retrieved 2 March 2021)
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Cocoa Pest

''B. thalassina'' has been recognised as a 'new encounter pest' of

West Africa West Africa or Western Africa is the westernmost region of Africa. The United Nations defines Western Africa as the 16 countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Maurit ...

n cacao, ''

Theobroma cacao ''Theobroma cacao'', also called the cacao tree and the cocoa tree, is a small ( tall) evergreen tree in the family Malvaceae. Its seeds, cocoa beans, are used to make chocolate liquor, cocoa solids, cocoa butter and chocolate. The largest pro ...

'' since the 1960s, when it was observed that "large

nymphs A nymph ( grc, νύμφη, nýmphē, el, script=Latn, nímfi, label=Modern Greek; , ) in ancient Greek folklore is a minor female nature deity. Different from Greek goddesses, nymphs are generally regarded as personifications of nature, are typ ...

and adults … feed on developing cocoa pods, causing damage to the beans. The small nymphs feed mainly on the leaves and do little damage. The adults have long feeding stylets (about 22 mm) which can penetrate the pod cortex and suck liquid from the developing beans. This results in malformed or atrophied beans. In ripe pods the malformed beans are brown instead of pink, and dry, lacking the sugary mucilage which normally covers beans."Gerald BM (1965) ''Bathycoelia thalassina'' (Herrich-Schaeffer), (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae); a Pest of ''Theobroma cacao'' L. ''Nature'' 207, 881.

References

External links

*
Image on dropdata.org: taken in Ghana
{{taxonbar, from=Q105730168 Pentatominae Hemiptera of Africa