Tomato leaf miner

The life cycle of a leaf miner has the following stages: egg, three larval instars, a pupal instar and the adult fly. Adult leaf miners are small yellow and black coloured flies, at most only several millimetres long. When the adult females feed or lay eggs, they bore a hole using their toothed ovipositor, usually in the upper side of the leaf. Egg spots are oval and hard to distinguish from feeding spots.

Larvae of Liriomyza bryoniae are transparent white, older larvae have a yellow head. When the larva hatches from the egg, it begins to eat into the leaf at once, tunnelling down into the mesophyll tissue where damage is caused by extensive mines, leaving the outer layers of the leaf and stalk intact. Shortly before pupating, the grown larva cuts a sickle-shaped exit hole in the leaf with its mouth parts. After roughly one hour the larva crawls out of the leaf and falls to the ground. This occurs in the early morning. The larva crawls into the ground to pupate. A small percentage of the larvae remain hanging on the leaf and pupate there, sometimes on the upper surface but more commonly on the underside. The late third instar larva, that emerges from its tunnel just prior to pupating, is known as a prepupa. This stage lasts only a few hours.