thumb | right | alt=Ferrisia virgata adult and egs | Ferrisia virgata adult and egs Ferrisia is a genus of mealybugs.
thumb | right | alt=Ferrisia virgata adult and egs | Ferrisia virgata adult and egs Ferrisia is a genus of mealybugs.
==Taxonomic history== David T. Fullaway circumscribed the genus in 1923. He included one species: F. virgata, which was initially described in Dactylopius and had been transferred to Pseudococcus. In 1929, Ryoichi Takahashi proposed Ferrisiana as a replacement name because he thought the existence of the mollusk genus Ferrissia meant Ferrisia was an invalid junior homonym. Ferrisiana was subsequently used by other authors to refer to this genus. In the 1960s, Harold and Emily R. Morrison and Howard L. McKenzie showed that the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature says the difference of one letter is enough to distinguish genera names, making Ferrisia the valid name for the genus.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).