I have this white stuff on my plants

elpipetuanis

12 years ago

Does anyone know what this is? I go around wiping it off all my plants when i can but I don't have any clue what it is.

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Comments (10)

mister_gin
12 years ago
I get this on a number of plants. Mostly peppers and marigolds but have seen it on other plants as well. I believe it is a waxy egg covering secreted from a Sharpshooter leafhopper. I could be wrong though. That may or may not be one in the upper left hand corner of your pic.

There was a link, in an older post, to the ag.arizona.edu website regarding this but that link is no longer valid.
thisisme
12 years ago
Looks like Woolly Aphids to me.

Here is a link that might be useful: Woolly Aphid pictures
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mangledmind
12 years ago
i'm glad you asked this and provided a pic ... we get this on our berries (black, rasp, blue) as well as our nightshades (toms, peppers etc) ...
mister_gin
12 years ago
Learn something new all the time. I never even heard of a wooly aphid until now. I do not believe that is what is in the above pic though. If it were aphids then I would think they would move around but these don't. For me these white areas are usually formed in long lines and are easily wiped off. I don't bother removing it anymore as I haven't had any ill effects by it.
mangledmind
12 years ago
agreed mister gin ... I've put mine under a macro lens on the camera, and that stuff sure isn't alive ... I can't figure out what it is, but I do rub it down when found ... just in case ...
thisisme
12 years ago
Actually Woolly Aphids do not move around. Its not really wool. Its wax that builds up on them and keeps them from flying or moving around. They have been discussed many times in the Fruit & Orchard Forum and that is what they look like.
kingkongos
12 years ago
I posted a thread about this a few weeks back. I have the exact same thing on my peppers and eggplants. Definitely not wooly aphids. It's not an insect. Slight chance it's an insect egg but in my opinion it's secretion of some sort. After not seeing any damage to my plants I totally forgot about it. I meant to send a pic to the extension office to see if they could identify it but it slipped my mind.
thisisme
12 years ago
Well if its not Woolly Aphids I would like to know what it is. It would help if there were some good close up pictures to make sure one way or another. In the past I have seen some insect eggs that are contained within excretions of sticky tiny white bubbles before. But the pictures do not look like that to me.
wabikeguy
12 years ago
About a month ago, I had something that looked just like that on a couple of new fig leaf stems on one of my trees. Whatever it was, it was firmly attached to the stems. I couldn't scrape it off. I pinched the stems off the main branch and tossed both leaves. And I havn't seen anything like that since.
thisisme
12 years ago
Dave what you are describing sounds like Scale. A Summer Oil spray seals them up in their hard wax shell and suffocates them.

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I have this white stuff on my plants

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mister_gin

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