Studying the involvement of phenotypic characters towards resistance of variant cucumber cultivars against phytophagous mites

Abstract

Cucumber is an important vegetable crop, belongs to the family Solanaceae. In Pakistan, Cucumber crop is attacked by number of sucking pests, which ultimately reduce yield to a significant level. Among these, phytophagous mites are important, which cause losses to the Cucumber. The host plant characters affect the magnitude of losses by these pests. Therefore, experiment was conducted to find out the effect of different morphological plant characters, viz., number of leaf, leaf area, plant height, hair density and thickness of leaf lamina on six Cucumber varieties viz., Cucumis, Cucumber Salman, and Cucumber 72, Sialkot, Yousef and Punjab. The results showed that Cucumber Salman is a resistant variety against phytophagous mite and Yousef and Cucumber 72 are highly susceptible varieties. It can also be concluded that no single factor is responsible in mite population fluctuation but all the factors work in compliment with each other.