Oryza glaberrima not shatter, making the grains easy for humans to gather. A mutation that caused rice not to shatter would probably have been the beginning of domestication. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa recorded rice couscous in the area of present-day Mali in 1350. In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Portuguese sailed to the Southern Rivers area in West Africa and wrote that the land was rich in rice. "<nowiki>[T]</nowiki>hey said they found the country covered by vast crops, with many cotton trees and large fields planted in rice … the country looked to them as having the aspect of a pond (i.e.,
Elasmopalpus brown anterior and distal margins. The larvae feed on a wide range of plants but prefer grasses. Recorded host plants include a number of economically important plants such as "Phaseolus vulgaris", "Beta vulgaris", "Brassica oleracea" var. "capitata", "Cucumis melo", "Cyperus esculentus", "Zea mays", "Vigna unguiculata", "Phaseolus lunatus", "Avena sativa", "Pisum sativum", "Arachis hypogaea", "Capsicum annuum", "Oryza sativa", "Secale cereale", "Sorghum bicolor", "Glycine max", "Sorghum sudanense", "Saccharum officinarum", "Ipomoea batatas", "Lycopersicon esculentum", "Brassica rapa" and "Triticum aestivum". They tunnel into the crown of their host plant, severely weakening large plants and often killing young seedlings. They spin silken tubes near the