These Little Pests Are Eating My Lawn Roots

[Greenside]

Patches of our Malaysian grass are going brown and these as well as white pupae are to be found near the surface.  Trying to get a positive ID so I know the right treatment before they eat the lot!  Termites? Ants of some kind?  Any ideas would be welcome.

[cooked]

Looks like the larva of a species of Mayfly, which can really damage a lawn by eating the grass roots. Depending on the species it may live in your lawn for a year or more before metamorphosing into a Mayfly. No idea what they use here but I believe most insecticides would work.

[Greenside]

Thanks for the post - The picture's a bit rubbish so it's not as easy as it might be to ID the little bugger but you can see the kind of damage they are doing in the pictures below.  We had some brown patches last year but nothing on this scale and they work pretty fast too.  We've lost a whole area in one part of the garden and they're spreading so whatever I do about this will have to be a treatment for the entire plot.

[cooked]

To be honest, I have cows on my green bit a lot of the time, I didn't even bother to make a lawn. Each to his own!

[sometime]

If the little critters are only eating the roots a General insecticide won’t work, you need a systemic insecticide, and this lets the plant take the chemical down to the roots. 

My trouble is caterpillars, for this I use Bayer SEVIN 85

[drtreelove]

Sometime's suggestion may be effective, but not the best advise for safety and environmental contamination. Sevin is a carbamate. It's a toxic substance and can be harmful to people and pets. http://www.petpoisonhelpline.com/poison/carbamate/

 

Organic program compatible materials should be considered, to avoid toxicity and environmental contamination. I would go with a neem product, but not neem oil in this case because the oil can mess up soil structure. I've bought the neem extract product: azadirachtin 1.2% and 3% products in Chiang Mai.  Initial applications can be tank mixed with pyrethrins as a contact control. If you can't find pyrethrins (the chrysanthemum extract botanical insecticide) then permethrin or cypermethrin are the synthetic version. Not systemic, but not highly toxic to people and pets.