author(s)
SK Gupta and S Mondal

abstract
Due to rapid increase in economic importance of medicinal plants and consequent upon its increased cultivation throughout India, its pest problems are also increasing at equal pace causing growing economic loss to the farmers. Among the pests of medicinal plants, nematodes are assuming serious status causing substantial reduction of active ingredients (phyto-chemicals having therapeutic values) and such plants loose market acceptability. As the nematode fauna infesting medicinal plants of West Bengal remained unexplored, the present study towards exploration of nematodes of medicinal plants was taken up during November, 2014 to December, 2016 to plug that gap and results thereof are presented in this paper. It reports a total of 37 species under 23 genera, 17 families, 6 orders including several new host records on medicinal plants of West Bengal. These species belong to phytophagous group (7 spp.) predatory group (10 spp.) and the remaining belong to other feeding groups like fungivorous, bacteriovorous and omnivorous. So far none of the species was found to cause any serious economic loss to their hosts. This paper, apart from giving detailed taxonomic account, also provides keys to all the taxonomic categories dealt with in this paper.