Abstract: ‘Dahuangpao’ is a yellowing new tea elite cultivar with special yellow foliage. The adults of spiny citrus whitefly, Aleurocanthus spiniferus, is keen on flying to tea cultivars whose leaf color is bright and shining with yellow chroma being slightly high. Especially, the whiteflies preferred to directionally fly to and gather on ‘Dahuangpao’ tea shoots for mating, chasing, oviposition, piercing and sucking sap, secreting and resting. In order to reveal its taxis mechanism, the volatiles of the tea seedlings were collected by headspace aeration sampling method from which twenty compounds were identified. Among them methyl salicylate, linalool, cis-3-hexen-1-ol, n-hexanol and tran-2-hexenal significantly attracted the adults of the whiteflies in a Y-tube olfactometer bioassay, respectively. Within resting habitat in greenhouse, ‘Dahuangpao’ tea seedling models baited by the five infochemicals at equal ratio intensely attracted the adults in flight. This study demonstrated the five volatile compounds from ‘Dahuangpao’ tea seedlings were strongly attractive to the adults. And the combination of these volatiles with the special yellow leaf colour, and the shape of tea plants resulted in orientation and landing of adults onto ‘Dahuangpao’ tea plants.

Key words: ‘Dahuangpao’, spiny citrus whitefly, orientation and landing, volatile organic compounds, golden yellow