author(s)
Padala Vinod Kumar, K Sreedevi and Eldho Varghese

abstract
The white grub species Holotrichia consanguinea Blanchard, is cosmopolitan in distribution and a major pest of several economic crops. The present studies have been carried out to document the intraspecific variations among three different geographical populations of H. consanguinea in India. Morphometrics of 23 characters in males and 19 in females were studied from each population and the data were subjected to different statistical analyses viz., univariate, multivariate, principal component analysis and discriminant function analysis. The various analyses revealed that maximum selected character states showed significant differences among all three populations. The principal component analysis revealed that PC1 and PC2 could explain 42.64% variation in males and 63.57% in females, which had loadings of five characters that can be useful in differentiating the three populations. The discriminant function analysis confirmed the worthiness of selected characters in differentiating the three populations of both male and female H. consanguinea. The territorial map drawn from two canonical discriminant functions showed the plots of three distinct populations indicating that significant differences exist among the three populations of H. consanguinea, which need to be explored further.