Abstract

Vernonia calvoana is a culture spread across the world and prized for its culinary and medicinal virtues. The data was collected in Yaoundé, Central Cameroon region through manual harvesting at two stations from 2017 to 2019. A total of 168 species or morphospecies belonging to 47 families and 12 orders from two phyla were collected. The most abundant phylum was Arthropoda which represented 99.96% of the total number of all species, while Mollusca represented the rest. Within arthropoda, insecta class was found the most dominant. In Insecta, Formicidae and Aphididae were the most frequent families. At Nkolbisson, Hymenoptera and Hemiptera are more abundant on the purple variety than on the white variety. However, both are less abundant compared to those at Nlong-mvolye. The species Uroleucon compositae (37.01%), Hilda cameroonensis (4.67%) and Sphaerocoris annulus (2.71%) were the most abundant species recorded in all the three variants. Depending on the preference with the host plant, some orders have a distribution according to the site, but also, the variety.

Key words: Manual harvest, insecta, hymenoptera, hemiptera, Nkolbisson, Nlong-mvolye.