Fungus gnats look similar. as to plants dieing, its cilantro and they do yellow after a few days on older leaves. It appears that your watering too much and that cna also deal to damping off and the base of the stems will dry out casing the plant to die. Avoid using common potting or garden soils as they can contain both issues. Sterial seed starting medium will give better results and has no fungus or insect cultures in it to cause these damages. To remove the fungus gnats, use yellow sticky traps placed horizontally on the edges of the pots. For the eggs and maggpots they produce, use a form of Bt that will kill the maggots in the soil. Numerous times these same issues have been asked covered here and I give the same answers repeatedly. Here is a link that might be useful: Fungus gnat photos

I've the exact problem. Can Confirm, as secretmail021 has identified, it is a very very very small insect. White-green color, approximately as wide as 1-2 human hairs, about 1.5 mm in length... you won't see them on the leaf, Instead, pick a leaf and shake/tap it over a well-lit preferably dark surface.... if they fall off, you can see them crawl. Happened with indoor potted plant that was otherwise healthy for the last month. No idea for the solution, but act fast, because it spread from a few just a few leaves to a few plants over the course of half a week. RIP basil.

Hank, They could have come from anywhere, you know. They have been hanging around, lurking, just waiting for someone to plant something they really, really like so they could gobble it up. Insects are just a part of the natural world. Sometimes it does amaze me that they can find gardens that contain the very plants they most want to eat. Take asparagus beetles for example. There are not an overwhelming number of gardeners in Oklahoma who grow asparagus. However, just plant some asparagus in your vegetable garden and somehow the asparagus beetles will find it. How do they do that? I have found that garden pests are the worst in new gardens. I guess a new garden is like a buffet to them. I think the insects are worse in general if you don't have a lot of the good bugs like ladybugs, green lacewings, trichogramma wasps, beneficial parasitic nematodes, predator mites, spined soldier bugs and praying mantids. The good bugs help keep the bad bugs under control. It took me a long time to learn this. When I was a kid, my dad always raised tomatoes. Every year, about late June or early July, the red spider mites would show up. They showed up not just on his plants but on the tomato plants of all his gardening friends in our neighborhood. Once the red spider mites showed up, you knew that your plants' days were numbered, no matter what you did. The gardeners would whip out the Kelthane and spray the plants and it seemed that, instead of helping control the spider mites, it made their population spiral wildly out of control. No matter what you did, the mites got worse and worse and worse. As a young adult with a new (to us) home and garden, I planted tomato plants. About the 3rd or 4th week of June, the spider mites showed up. We sprayed with Kelthane and got the same results my dad always got. More spider mites. It really made me crazy. The second year we were there, 1985, here came the spider mites in late June. I was already beginning to move towards gardening organically, so I decided I would not spray Kelthane on the plants. Guess what? The spider mites never went away, but they didn't get worse and they didn't kill my plants. I began to understand that spraying a poison miticide or insecticide did not guarantee a bug-free garden. Still, it took me many years to really understand it all. As I gardened organically, I came to have more and more good bugs over time and fewer and fewer bad ones. It took me FOREVER to really grasp the concept that the good bugs were keeping the population of the bad bugs under control. What I finally learned, from reading a lot about organic gardening and THEN from seeing it in my own garden is this: if you spray a miticide to kill spider mites, it will kill ALL the mites, including the predator mites that eat spider mites. The bad bugs always rebound first as the predator bugs won't arrive until there is a good supply of bad bugs to eat. So, by killing off the one insect, the predator mites, that would kill my red spider mites, I had actually made my spider mite population worse. Nowadays I have a good balance of bugs in the garden and the good ones help keep the population of the bad ones under control. Even though insect and mite damage is unsightly, it usually won't kill the plants. For what it is worth, this year I have the fewest bad bugs I have EVER had. I can't explain why, but I would say my bug population is only about 10% of what it normally is. It might be the cold weather we had in April killed them off and they have been slow to rebound. It might be that last summer's drought killed off a lot of them. Whatever the reason, I am enjoying it. Dawn

I stumbled upon this post a few weeks back because I too was really puzzled by the appearance of these tiny black dots sprinkled all over my wall paper, monstera plant, the curtains, and my bedding. They looked like poppy seeds but attached/stuck to the plant, wallpaper, and the fabric. After carefully scraping them off with my fingernail and vacuuming the curtains, I would be astonished to find a new set of dots peppering the same wall all over again a few hours later. I got a bit obsessive over the next couple of days as this really bothered/disgusted me (the plant is right next to my bed/pillow), but eventually I found the culprit (actually on several occasions). It turned out to be a moth, or at least that's what I figured once I saw it. When I researched the internet trying to figure out what these dots/seeds/eggs could be, I passed on the idea of it being moth eggs because in all the photos the eggs were neatly arranged close together, but mine were spread all over the place about 10-50 cms apart 1 egg at a time. During the day, I typically open the windows to air out, sometimes only a bit, so I guess moths must find their way inside the house and then hide themselves very well. I found one hidden in the folds of the curtain. I found a second moth a few days later again in the very corner of the room hidden by the folds of the curtain. I think these suckers are just very good at hiding & camouflaging because my husband and I were carefully screening the folds and looking all over and didn't notice any the previous days. I even watered the plant daily to ensure there weren't any moths or other culprits hiding in there. Unfortunately I continue to periodically find these black pin-sized heads on the same wall and curtain, but I'm less freaked out about it now that I know what it is and much more thorough at looking for the culprits. My advice is to make sure you close the windows and really check all the cracks since they're very good at hiding.