Abstract
We investigated the occurrence of fruit damage caused by thrips in relation to fruit morphology in the fig cultivars ‘Masui Dauphine’ and ‘Summer Red’. The rate of fruit damage caused by thrips during the harvest period (August─October), and in pre-harvest immature fruit (June─July) from 2018 to 2021 was lower for ‘Summer Red’ compared to that for ‘Masui Dauphine’. In addition, the immature pre-harvest fruit of ‘Masui Dauphine’ had a greater proportion of fruit with internal cavities compared to the proportion of cavities in ‘Summer Red’ fruit. The results of logistic regression, using the presence or absence of the opening of the top of the fruit as the objective variable and the cavity diameter as the explanatory variable, indicated that the probability of fruit opening in both cultivars was significantly affected by the size of the cavity inside the fruit. When the thrips damage in the immature pre-harvest fruit was classified using a decision tree, the fruits that settled in the 7th to 9th stages of the shoots had internal cavities or fruit opening. If a fruit was open, it showed a high rate of damage by thrips.
