Hi everyone,
I’ve had this finger lime tree for a number of years now, and I have never noticed this sort of growth (?) or bug (?) or (??) before.
It doesn’t look normal for sure. Tried to scratch it off with a branch, but it wouldn’t come off. I’m sure if I scraped it, it would.
I’m leaning towards scraping it off. Is this an indication of worse things to come? I’ve no idea what this is.
I live in Melbourne, Australia.
Thank you! 😫
Edit: To clarify, it is the red thing with the white dots around it.
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Scale insect! https://environmentalfactor.com/pages/scale
Oh, yuck! I’ve had scale on plants before, but I’ve not seen one that looks like this. I’ll be removing this in the next 5 minutes. Thank you!
I’m no expert but it looks like some kind of scale insect. There’s a huge variety, and some do like citrus, so maybe search by images. I’m Team Scrape.
Oh, I am definitely scraping it off and inspecting the rest of the tree more closely. I’m used to seeing the brown scale, not ones like this before. I also removed two very big caterpillars this morning boldly continuing to eat once I set my eyes on them.
Thank you!
Check on the caterpillars before you kill more, just in case they’re some kind of great native butterfly 🦋 if so you can maybe relocate them instead. I get some fat green guys on my non-native gold medallion tree that become pretty yellow native butterflies, and the tree recovers.
Ah, this is true. I didn’t think about this. 😔 This poor tree has been through the ringer. When I lived at a higher elevation, it nearly died in its first year because of how cold it got. It recovered really well, and now survives all weather. I guess being my first native tree, I go in to protective mode because so many bugs seem to like to eat it, too!
I did see my first honey bee today visiting the flowers, and it had some decent-sized pants. My usual panic (might be allergic) was replaced with “Ah… Hello, bee <3”
I’m glad it’s doing well! I’ve had good luck taking the whole leaf from one overrun tree to another untouched one, so I don’t have to squeeze the caterpillar. Maybe there’s a non- native citrus tree that could handle a caterpillar or two? You don’t have to save them all, Nature wouldn’t.
There’s no other non native (or native) citrus tree I could give it to. Suppose I could try to entice the magpies to have it, but I don’t have any other bushes or trees that produce anything edible, so the caterpillar might not take to them. I’d have to huck it over the fence to the neighbours’ tomatoes 😂