Transcript:
If your San Pedro Bolivian touch para blonde touch of peyote is suffering from insect damage. This video will help you identify. What type of insect is causing it? The five most common pest for this cacti are fungus gnats scale. Milly bugs, thrips and red spider mites. What this video will not show you is how to get rid of them for that. You will need to watch individual videos for each of these types of insects. I’ve already uploaded one on fungus gnats and in the future, I will also make videos on how to get rid of scale Midi bugs, thrips and red spider mites, so stay tuned the first type of pest. I will talk about is one that only affects very young seedlings of a few days or a few weeks of age, and that is fungus gnats. They look like tiny flies, and they are very annoying as they love to fly very close to your face if you use a yellow sticky trap or just put some. Vaseline on a piece of yellow plastic or paper. They should be attracted to the color and get stuck there, which will allow you to take a closer look with a magnifying glass. They actually look a bit like tiny mosquitoes. You want to control them? As soon as you start seeing them, otherwise, the larvae could eat the roots of your young seedlings until they all fall flat. So if you see some of your seedlings falling flat, it is likely that some fungus gnat larvae have been eating their roots for further confirmation. If you move the sword with the tip of a knife, you may see some of the larvae looking like this. Drawing about 6 millimeter in size or a quarter of an inch and usually transparent. You can also leave some pata 2 slices on top of the soil, and the larvae will be attracted to it like this. You won’t need to search for them in the soil. Now that you’ve identified that you have fungus nuts. You can find out that you get rid of them by watching my video. How to get rid of fungus nuts. Next up on, the most-wanted list is scale. These are really easy to identify as it will appear as little dots on the plants. These dots can either be white tan or brown, depending on the species of scale insect. You are the first thing you have to do is to try and wipe them off with a red rag. If they don’t wipe off. Even when you insist, they are most likely to be just scars from contact with other spines, which can often look similar if they do wipe off. Then, you know, it’s Kala. And if you pay attention, you may even see a tiny red dot underneath the scaler that is the insect itself, the scale being just a waxy shell that it uses for protection, which is why these bugs are often referred to as our moth scale. Insect’s scale is very common and not something to worry about too much unless you let it spread and it ends up severely damaging the plant or even killing it the best way to get rid of scale insects is by wiping them away with a soft rag slightly wet as soon as you see them so that they don’t spread, although I plan to make a video showing various ways to treat AVO infestations from soapy water to predatory insects to more toxic systemic insecticides. So keep your eyes peeled for that video. Midi bugs are another type of scale insect that is on our mod, the living colonies that look like blobs of sticky cotton wool just lack scale. They suck the SAP of the Earth’s plants, but they are not stationary. Therefore, they can spread easier and faster. Also, they can cause a severe malformation on the plant called witch’s broom. I plan to make a video on how to get rid of them, including soapy water, or a solution of water and isopropyl alcohol or predator insects as ladybugs or even cutting off the affected parts if the bugs have caused malformations so far, the three types of Bergs we have seen in this video are super easy to identify the other two are much harder to identify, mostly because both species can create similar looking bite marks. These insects are thrips and red spider mites. Typically, Thrips will attack more the trigger series cacti like San Pedro, whereas red spider mice. We prefer the peyote. How can you know if you have ribs or spider mites? Well, there are two methods. I use the first one is to capture a bug without squashing it and then kill it by pouring alcohol on it. And then you will need to look at it under the microscope, a small and three level microscope with a LED light like the one. You see, now is well, just a few dollars or euros. You will immediately know if you are dealing with flips or spider mites and you can compare the insect you’ve captured with images found on the Internet. Red spider mattress, actually not spiders but mites. I’ve got eight legs and are red in color. Keep in mind! There are various types of spider mites. The red spider mite being just one of them. Strips are usually transparent and have more of an elongated body. However, thrips can look very different during each of their life stages. If you do an internet search of thrip’s life stages, you will find images of the five different stages, so you can positively identify thrips in this instance after color photo of the stem of a San Pedro seedling, which had some tiny insects on it that I could barely see with the naked eye looking at the photo blown up on my computer, I can identify with 100% certainty. There are it’s in one of their first life stages as they are larvae without wings. It is really important that you visually identify whether it’s trips or spider mites, causing the damage because many of the treatments to kill them are specific to one species or another. For instance, springtails look a bit like thrips, but they are harmless for a cacti, in fact, if you try to capture the insect, but it jumps all over the place. It’s very likely that you are dealing with springtails instead of ribs. I am planning on making videos on how to get rid of ribs and red spider mats in the future in the meantime. I’m sure you can find information on how to control them somewhere else on the Internet, another way to identify them and this one does not involve capturing an insect is to take some highly detailed photos of the soil with insects in it for that, we need the design quality camera in macro photography mode. Then you broke the photo full size on your computer screen, and you compare it with photos of the bugs found on the Internet. Now that you’ve identified the type of insect causing damage to your cacti. Make sure that you isolate the affected plants from the rest of your collection. Treat them as soon as you can and always go for the mildest and least toxic form of treatment first. If you enjoyed this video, make sure you hit like, click the little bell and subscribe, and I will see you again next week for another video on secrete cacti you.