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.
