Fan palm infestation

[doglover]

I need help to bring my fan palm back to health. It is infested with some kind of bugs. Probably due to me cutting off green stems. Something I will no longer do. Assistance with natural methods would be appreciated.

[drtreelove]

It's hard to tell from the photos. Is that termite shelter/mud tubes, and superficial feeding on leaf surface? If so, being a small plant, you may be able to knock/wipe off the tubes best you can all the way to the base of the palm where they are working their way up from the soil. You can do this with your hand, or a gloved hand, or maybe with a strong jet of water. Then apply a protective insecticide barrier at the base of the plant, with a pyrethroid product, like the commonly available Chaindrite 1 Crack and Crevice (alphacypermethrin and bifenthrin). This product will have about a 1 month residual barrier effectiveness, except maybe in the rainy season when it may dissipate more rapidly.

Or is that plant/flower debris that is accumulating and decomposing and causing superficial fungal damage to the leaf surface? I'm not sure. don

[doglover]

Thanks for the response. Definitely not termites. Nor is it plant debris from a taller neighbouring plant. It is some sort of worm or caterpillar. MIL says it will grow drastically. Not a good thing for the palm tree I would think. I've attached a photo but there is no macro setting on the phone.

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[drtreelove]

The caterpillar visible in the second photo appears to be the larva of a moth, the pellets are it's excrement droppings. I don't know which moth and I've rarely seen much damage from this type of pest on palms. It may not be that damaging on a palm and may be tolerable. Certain moths lay their eggs on the plant and when the larvae hatch they feed by scarifying the leaf surface or chewing leaf margins as they get bigger and hungrier. Some caterpillars do minimal damage to plants and complete their larval stage and go into pupation without much harm to the plant, but some host plants get defoliated.

If you see that the feeding is causing more damage than you want to tolerate, aesthetically or for plant health, then it may be easy to suppress the infestation on smaller plants like this with manual methods, picking them or hosing them off of the plant. Other non-toxic methods of control would be spraying with a botanically derived pesticide like neem seed oil extract, or pyrethrin (a chrysanthemum extract), or by using a biological control like BT (a bacteria that infects only caterpillars). These "natural" methods usually don't have much residual effectiveness and need repeating weekly if the pest persists. Least toxic (for mammals) pesticides like the Chaindrite products containing pyrethroids have more residual activity, but they also have more negative effect on beneficial organisms, and are very toxic to honey bees, fish, and other aquatic life.

I suspect that this is not a real big problem for your palm, and the caterpillars will do some feeding and then be gone until next year cycle. Hosing them off with a strong jet of water may be all you need for control. Help your trees withstand and resist pests and diseases by optimizing the growing conditions, watering, mulching and improving soil fertility. don

[drtreelove]

And you're right about not cutting off too many green palm fronds. This may not be directly related to the caterpillar infestation, but reducing green leaf surface excessively on any plant will of course limit the plant's capacity for photosynthesis and the natural manufacture of sugars and bio chemistry that is needed for nutrition and resistance to pests and diseases.

[doglover]

Thanks for your help don. I'll give it a go.