Mitochondrial COI and 16sRNA Evidence for a Single Species Hypothesis of E. vitis, J. formosana and E. onukii in East Asia

Tea green leafhopper is one of the most damaging tea pests in main tea production regions of East Asia. For lack of recognized morphological characters, the dominant species of tea green leafhoppers in Mainland China, Taiwan and Japan have always been named as Empoasca vitis Göthe, Jacobiasca formosana Paoli and Empoasca onukii MATSUDA, respectively. Furthermore, nothing is known about the genetic relationships among them. In this study, we collected six populations from Mainland China, four populations from Japan and one population from Taiwan, and examined the genetic distances in the COI and 16sRNA regions of mtDNA among them. The results showed that the genetic distances based on single gene or the combined sequences among eleven leafhopper populations were 0.3–1.2%, which were all less than the species boundary of 2%. Moreover, there were at least two haplotypes shared by two distinct populations from different regions. The phylogenetic analysis based on single gene or combined sets also supported that tea green leafhoppers from Mainland China, Taiwan and Japan were closely related to each other, and there were at least two specimens from different regions clustered ahead of those from the same region. Therefore, we propose that the view of recognizing the dominant species of tea green leafhoppers in three adjacent tea production regions of East Asia as different species is unreliable or questionable and suggest that they are a single species.