Fourth Pest Surveillance

10th March 2021

 As always at 10 AM, we conducted our fourth pest surveillance today, since last Friday the weather has been cool and mostly cloudy. There was heavy rain on Friday and it has been relatively cool for the past few days. There was some improvement today as clouds began to clear. It was a sunny day, the temperature was 21° Celsius and the relative humidity was 87 per cent for the area.

Like last time we opted for a blitz survey, considering the small size of our field. The prominent pest found in the field was aphids. The population density of each colony has increased to more than 80 aphids. There are around 30 aphid colonies, similarly, the number of ladybugs in the field has increased too there are 71 ladybugs. As reported last time, there are sporadic red ant infestations but limited to few plants and their symptoms can easily be identified by looking at the sudden wilting and death of cauliflower plants. The researcher has been promptly replacing sick plants especially the ones infested by red ants. The last pest that we found was eggs of cabbage white butterfly on the underside of the leaves, there were six batches of eggs. They were diagnosed as cabbage white butterfly eggs due to their conical and longitudinal shape and orange color eggs. The researcher promptly removed the eggs and disposed of them.

One interesting activity that we noted was that fields lying below our field were cleared, ploughed and readied for other crop cultivation. These cleared fields had Cole crops.