It's hard to tell exactly from the pic, but it looks kinda like leaf miner. Leaf miner is a tiny insect which burrows between the top and bottom epidermis of the leaf. It wanders around in a random path. From that description you can tell if you have leaf miners and look up the appropriate treatment if you do. Small seedlings get sheared off at ground level by cutworms. The solution is easy. Cutworms must encircle the stem to do their work, so you can block them by inserting a toothpick or matchstick into the soil parallel to and against the stem. Gardening has many opportunities for failure. I hope you have lots of big successes to compensate for the failures. Jim

The squiggly trail on one leaf was caused by a leafminer. The white stuff is from citrus whiteflies and sooty mold, which occurs along with whiteflies. Don't panic. These won't kill your tree. You can hose off the whiteflies. The leafminers are already inside the leaf, so there's not much to do now, but you can control the adult form with sticky traps you hang near your citrus. Here is a link that might be useful: Citrus pests

Patty: Yeah I've spent many hours on BugGuide.net and WhatsThatBug.com researching with my kids the various little bugs, insects, and critters found around here. They are excellent repositories but are extremely cumbersome to try to use yourself to ID something. The above pics are the first time I've done so and haven't had a reply yet. Going through thousands of images in each family take forever to ID a spider or whatever, even when bugguide at least starts you out based on a specific shape. Rhizo: Thanks so much! It does appear to be a midge. The Chironomini midge here looks very close to the middle one of mine above. >>> Do you live near a pond or a lake? There is a small estuary about 1 mile (as the wind blows) north of here fed by the San Joaquin River. Other than that, our city is filled with ponding basins everywhere, almost everyone lives within 1 mile of one. Although they are dried up now, the late season rainfall may have left some with enough muck for perfect breeding grounds. Never seen them before but I know much more about them now. I know the city takes action against the throngs of foreclosed homes with swimming pools serving as breeding grounds for insects. That is, unless the skate borders got to them first.

Hmm...that looks like what I thought was black citrus aphids on my Ponkan which I wrote about in another post. It is strange how it keeps going after that one tree. I keep spraying and cleaning it off with oil spray or soapy spray but it keeps reappearing. I hope it does not spread to my other trees. The new leaves are beginning to harden up on the tree now so I hope the bug will soon give up on it, but also am afraid it will start looking at the new growrh on my other trees. I treat them all with the sprays. I can't figure out where they are coming from as I don't see any ants nor what about it that attracts them to that particular tree. I have another Ponkan at the other end of the greenhouse and so far that is not attracting them. I think maybe that is because that tree gets a lot of air movement as it is nearer a fan. I keep suspecting my hibiscus may be the host as I usually keep them away from my other plants as they are notorious bug magnets, but even they seem bug free so far and not near this particular tree. Maybe they are in the soil of that particular tree, but I have even drenched the soil and I am still getting the black aphid or black fly back for now about 2 months. It is interesting to me that it likes that particular tree. Cory