thrips behaviour on a whole
plant compared to a leaf disc. Chitturi et al. (2006) have
shown that female F. occidentalis prefer to feed on whole
plant compared with excised leaves in a choice test. However,
a previous study showed high correlation between
thrips injury observed in leaf bioassays and in whole plant
tests (Maharijaya et al., 2011), which indicates that it is
possible to use leaf bioassays to rate the level of resistance
of pepper against thrips.