ORIGINAL PAPER Age-stage, two-sex life table of the tomato looper, Chrysodeixis chalcites (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae), on different bean cultivars Solmaz Alami • Bahram Naseri • Ali Golizadeh • Jabraeil Razmjou Received: 16 April 2014 / Accepted: 18 September 2014 / Published online: 30 September 2014 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 Abstract The tomato looper, Chrysodeixis chalcites (Esper), is one of the polyphagous pests of several eco- nomically crops worldwide. Two-sex life table parameters of C. chalcites reared on eight bean cultivars including white kidney bean (cultivars Daneshkadeh and Dehghan), red kidney bean (cultivars Goli and Naz), common bean (cultivars Khomein, Talash and Sadra) and cowpea (culti- var Mashhad) were studied under laboratory conditions (25 ± 1 °C, 65 ± 5 % RH, a 16:8-h light–dark photope- riod). The shortest larval period of C. chalcites was 14.15 days on common bean Sadra. The longest and shortest development time of total preadult was on white kidney bean Daneshkadeh and common bean Sadra (25.77 and 23.42 days, respectively). The highest total fecundity was on common bean Sadra (674.4 eggs), and the lowest was observed on white kidney bean Daneshkadeh (136.7 eggs). The intrinsic rate of increase (r m ) ranged from 0.0976 to 0.1599 female/female/day, which was lowest on white kidney bean Daneshkadeh and highest on common bean Sadra. The net reproductive rate (R 0 ) was highest on common bean Sadra (265.82 offspring) and lowest on white kidney bean Daneshkadeh (46.88 offspring). The results revealed that the cultivar Daneshkadeh was unsuitable host to C. chalcites in comparison to the other cultivars tested. Keywords Tomato looper  Intrinsic rate of increase  Population growth  Bean Introduction The golden twin-spot moth, also known as the tomato looper, Chrysodeixis chalcites (Esper) (Lepidoptera: Noc- tuidae), is one of the most important polyphagous insect pests of vegetables, ornamentals and greenhouse plants that is distributed in Africa, Oceania, Southern Europe and South Asia (Cayrol 1972; Lempke and De Vos 1992; Ca- bello et al. 1996; van Oers et al. 2004). The host plant leaves may be skeletonized, by C. chalcites larval feeding. The penultimate and ultimate instar larvae are the most dam- aging feeders and will usually feed on the entire leaf but may avoid the midrib or other large veins. On leguminous crops, they may feed on the pods, sometimes cutting them in two (Rashid et al. 1971; Harakly and Farag 1975). The development of insecticide resistance and an increase in environmental contamination due to chemical pesticide use have complicated management programs of this pest (Alonso 2009; del Pino et al. 2011). Host plant resistance allows the plants to avoid, tolerate or recover from the effects of pest infestation (Tingey 1986; Panda and Khush 1995). Low quality plants may either reduce insect survival, size or weight, longevity and reproductive potential in adult stage, or indirectly increase insect’s exposure to natural enemies as a result of prolonged developmental time (Sarfraz et al. 2006). Life table studies are useful tools to understand dynamics of insect populations (Wittmeyer and Coudron 2001). The traditional age-specific life table deals only with the female population while ignoring males, the stage differentiation and variable developmental rate among individuals (Chi 1988; Chi and Yang 2003). Therefore, the application of the age-stage, two-sex life table model (Chi and Liu 1985; Chi 1988) overcomes such shortfalls when estimating life table parameters. Handling Editor: Joe Louis. S. Alami  B. Naseri (&)  A. Golizadeh  J. Razmjou Department of Plant Protection, Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, University of Mohaghegh Ardabili, Ardabil, Iran e-mail: bnaseri@uma.ac.ir 123 Arthropod-Plant Interactions (2014) 8:475–484 DOI 10.1007/s11829-014-9330-3