Morphometric Analysis of the Oil Palm Pollinating Weevil, Elaeidobius kamerunicus (Faust, 1878) (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) from Oil Palm Plantations in Malaysia

Abstract

The pollinating weevil, Elaeidobius kamerunicus was introduced to Malaysia as an oil palm pollinator agent in 1981. After the introduction, the weevil has distributed widely in the oil palm plantation around Malaysia. This study aims to investigate the morphometric differences in Elaeidobius kamerunicus population within Malaysia, as well as from its originating country, Cameroon. A total of 540 weevils were collected from eight localities in Malaysia, and 60 from Cameroon, Africa. The five morphological measurements were taken ie. total body length (TL), elytra length (EL), pronotum length (PL), body width (BW) and the snout length (SL) using the Portable Capture Pro v2.1 Dinolite. The one-way ANOVA indicated significant differences amongst the five morphological characteristics between the weevil populations for both males and females from the eight localities (P < 0.05), respectively. For the male and female populations at different localities, the Principal Component Analysis explained 79.0% and 76.6%, respectively. Moreover, the Canonical Discriminant Function explained 95.5% and 90.2% of the variance for male and female population, respectively. Both the result of PCA and CDA conducted showed little variation between the eight localities for male and female weevil populations in Malaysia respectively. This study showed slight differences in morphometric characters for the weevil population in Malaysia.