Small animals that attack innumerable fruits and vegetables sucking the sap and subtracting strength from the crop, however the most important damage they do is to be virus vectors that rapidly deteriorate the crops, this document refers to this serious problem and how to attack it to avoid losing our crops.
Who are the aphids?
Aphids are the cousins of white flies and scales, however it differs from the latter because the juvenile stages are mobile, that is, they have legs and can walk unlike their cousins that remain glued to the plant while they are small. adults in all three cases the only ones that have wings and can fly.
They are grouped in the most tender tissues of the plant and extract the sap to feed, in the process the tissues of the plant irritate and atrophy achieving irregular shapes.
Just as their cousins in the feeding process excrete a sugary substance that attracts the ants that feed on it, in exchange the ants defend the aphids from the attack of predatory insects.
This sugary substance also attracts a fungus called sooty mold that is deposited on the leaves and prevents the passage of light by subtracting photosynthesis.
Adult aphids have wings and can fly from one plant to another, if the plant where they took off was sick with a virus, then the aphid can transmit the disease by landing on the next plant and sucking the sap as the white-legged mosquito does with Dengue in humans.
What crops do aphids attack?
Aphids can attack a large number of crops, attack is famous in citrus, where it produces fungal leaves in the buds, but the most important damage was made by the black aphid, which transmitted a virus that caused the sadness of citrus fruits, the sadness of citrus, ended with millions of trees around the world, leaving the global citrus industry bankrupt, by the decade of the eighties in the last century.
In the case of paprika, they transmit viruses such as PVY, which wrinkle the leaves of the head and produce speckles, the uncontrolled attack by aphids is particularly important in greenhouses, especially when the use of agrochemicals is abused and they lose toxicity on the aphids.
The milky should be a crop of three to four years with continuous production, but the presence of a virus, affects the crop in such a way that the production can be used in just one year and if the attack is severe and in an early loses all production This virus is transmitted by many species of aphids.
In our technical assistance program, we have achieved significant damage by aphids in super sweet corn, which was accompanied by strong attacks of virus, however making a plan to control the aphid, brought as a consequence the decrease of the virus at unimportant levels, without However, the problem is latent and if the aphid control program is neglected, the problem with virosis can resurface.
Control of aphids
This is an easy pest to control when it is not transmitting viruses and what is pursued is to keep populations below the economic threshold of infestation (ie the point where they do not do economic damage and it is not profitable to control it).
However, if we wish to stop the progression of a virus, the problem is much more complex and almost always the disease manages to impose itself, given that a single insect is enough to transmit the disease.
Aphids have many biological controllers, ladybugs are the most famous, however the lacewings have a fundamental role, we know a case of a plantation of lemons that has virtually no aphids product of a large population of lacewings that were released years ago to control thrips and whitefly in vegetable crops, but adapted so well that nowadays they are flying abundantly at night in the crops.
When insecticides are used in an uncontrolled way to attack other insects, those insects that feed on the aphids are killed, then the aphid population explodes secondarily and they cause significant damage, as described in the article on the toxicity of agrochemicals.
Soap is an excellent controller of aphids that does not affect beneficial insects, we recommend reading the article soap against whitefly since the principles of control are the same, remember that whiteflies and aphids are cousins.
White oil is a recognized controller of aphids, it reduces the ability to breathe and insects die, but we must be careful not to mix it with sulfur because it can burn the crop to cause a strong phytotoxicity.
The sulfocalcium broth has aphids among its victims, perhaps due to its caustic nature, it affects the cuticle of the insect which dehydrates. To read how the sulfocalcium broth is used, we recommend reading the article on the use of this ecological broth.