Fungus or Insect?

Just before Christmas, I was rearranging the my pot plant garden outside my door as the fig tree had grown so that it was shading some of the pots. While doing this, I uncovered a very fine looking snail beneath my strawberry pot. I was confronted with a problem – I didn't want Mr. Snail eating my strawberries (and/or other plants) but I couldn't stomach killing him. Solution: Keep him as a pet instead :) I will post more about him later... But tonight's post comes from something I found when picking a leaf from my plant for Mr. Snail to eat.

It was almost dark, so I didn't really look too closely at the leaves before I picked one, it was just one that was handy. As I came inside, into the light, I noticed something near the base of the leaf, that at the time I thought was a fungus of some sort. I decided seeing as my snail's new home is a little bit confined that I didn't want to put that in there for him with the rest of the leaf, as he doesn't have the option of running away if it ends up being noxious. So I broke that part of the leaf off, before giving him the rest of the leaf. I left the piece of leaf with the 'fungus' on my desk, because I intended to come back and look at it a little closer later – it looked quite unusual. I started work last week and have been quite busy, so I forgot about it for a few days. Then one day, I noticed the 'fungus' had moved! It was no longer on the leaf, which was by now a bit dried out and shriveled. Instead I saw it on a nearby box. It was then I discovered it was not a fungus at all, but a bug.

Turning it over I discovered it had little legs...

A google search soon revealed it was a cottony cushion scale insect (Icerya purchasi). The white 'cotton cushion' it makes is its egg sac, but this one's egg sac was only just beginning to be made. The egg sac can end up being bigger than the insect.

Like other scale insects, it feeds on sap. This made sense, as when I first found it, it was on the mid vien of the leaf. As the leaf shriveled up, it wouldn't have been receiving sap anymore and evidently it went off exploring in search of a new food source.

I was also intrested to find out that it was first described from specimens collected from New Zealand, despite it being a non-native pest species. It comes from Australia instead. It apparently will feed on a wide range of plant species, but is particularly partial to Pittosporum and Citrus species.

So that was my interesting find this week for Reconnect With Nature :)