2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38
The gooseberry shoot aphid, like most other pests, is found almost everywhere. Her range of taste preferences includes not only gooseberries - this unpleasant pest will not refuse to feast on currants: black, golden and red. During each growing season, an average of eight to twelve generations of pests are reborn. The leaves attacked by larvae and females curl up and gradually form rather dense lumps, inside which huge colonies of these parasites settle. For damaged shoots, curvature is characteristic, and their growth either stops or slows down. To get rid of these scoundrels, it is important to timely identify their presence on the site and begin an operational fight against them
Meet the pest
The size of wingless parthenogenetic females of the gooseberry shoot aphid ranges from 1.2 to 1.9 mm. Their color is usually light: the tail, tubes and legs with antennae are painted in whitish tones. The antennae of voracious pests reach half the length of their bodies, their foreheads are convex, and their eyes are black. The wingless females are characterized by an ovoid-rounded shape.
As for the winged parthenogenetic females, their length ranges from 1, 2 to 1, 4 mm. Each individual is endowed with a blackish breast and head. The antennae with tubules are also painted black, the abdomens are green, and the tails are pale yellow.
Fertilized eggs overwinter on the bark of twigs near the very bases of the tiny buds. As soon as the buds begin to swell, the revival of the larvae starts. First, they populate tiny buds, sucking all the juices out of them. And as soon as the tender leaves appear, the starving parasites migrate to the green shoots and to the petioles of young leaves. After ten to twelve days, the harmful larvae turn into females, reviving up to thirty larvae each. Approximately from the fourth or fifth generation, winged females can also be observed flying over the vegetation that has not yet been inhabited. There they revive the larvae and form new and fairly numerous colonies.
Around August or September, individuals appear that revive the larvae, which are subsequently transformed into both females and males. Each fertilized female lays on gooseberry or currant shoots up to a dozen eggs, which remain to winter until the next spring. Eggs laid by gooseberry shoot aphids are usually shiny and black in color.
How to fight
In order to get rid of gooseberry shoot aphids, early spring treatments of gooseberry and currant bushes should be carried out. Moreover, it is necessary to keep within with such treatments before the kidneys begin to swell.
In the event that the gooseberry shoot aphid was found on berry bushes in a timely manner, that is, at the very beginning of its development or when it populates vegetation, and the number of berry bushes in the plots is relatively small, dipping (rinsing) the tops of shoots inhabited by gluttonous pests in a container is used filled with insecticide solution. As a rule, this measure yields very good results. And so that during such treatments not to break young shoots, they are bent over to the container with the solution as carefully as possible.
If harmful parasites managed to populate from 15 to 50% of fruit and leaf buds before flowering, they proceed to spraying with insecticides. They are also carried out if, at the end of the collection of berries, from three to five colonies of gooseberry shoot aphids begin to fall on every hundred of the apical shoots.
It is recommended to destroy the tops of the shoots only if the spraying has ceased to give the desired effect, and the leaves have begun to curl into rather dense lumps.
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