Different type of Borer??

[sheeshshe]

My beautiful melon plants that I had growing in my compost, are dying one by one. shriveling up and dying. I immediately assumed the squash vine borer was the culprit, however, when I opened up the stems, it was a different type of borer and not the white squash vine borer. I looked online, but I am having a hard time figuring out what it could be, SVB just keeps coming up. they're long and slender, and have a blackish tint to them.

[applestar]

Take a look at this thread and see if yours looked like the picture I posted. I put a link to an university site with info in that thread, but I'll go get it and add it here as well.

Subject: STALK BORER in my Tomato and Potato

https://www.vegedge.umn.edu/vegpest/SWTCORN/cstalk.htm

Damage

The hosts of the common stalk borer include: giant ragweed, grasses, vegetables, fruits, flowers, and more. The general rule is as long as the stem of the plant is large enough to give shelter and soft enough for the larvae to burrow into then it is a possible host.

Most of the damage caused by common stalk borer occurs in June and July when the larvae begin to move into crops. In corn, they should not be confused with the European corn borer, which infests crops later towards the end of July and into August.

[sheeshshe]

Oh man, I think that's what it is. this stinks. those were my prize cantaloupes! LOL they were looking sooooooooooo good. so good! they are flowering and getting ready to make melons and now this.

[Lindsaylew82]

.......... Can I unread this...?

I hope these guys don't show up here!!!

[rainbowgardener]

I know .... I hated applestar's thread when I read it. A SVB like beast that attacks EVERYTHING. I dealt with SVB's by just not growing any zucchini. If these things appeared, I might just have to give up gardening!

[sheeshshe]

sigh......... IDK what I'm going to do about this. This bites.

[applestar]

You could try injecting with Bt. I really think that helped to slow down the SVB's and it may work for the stalk borers too.

My Kakai squash vine is going down but slowly and the two fruits are looking like they will mature before the end (one is yellow -- Looking for mustard yellow to orange -- and the other one is yellowing). This makes sense because the plant will try to complete it's lifecycle if it thinks the end is near. It's just that the SVB's take them down too quickly. The volunteer pumpkin is still going -- the first fruit looks fully colored, but I'm hoping the one outside the fence will make it too.

(Ha! Just realized I should prune the end of that vine,)

[sheeshshe]

the BT injections never worked with the SVB here. the vines of the canteloupe are very skinny, and the borers inside are just tiny, the vine dies before they can get any bigger. it just shrivels up and dies

[DDMcKenna]

Now this is a depressing thread

[rainbowgardener]

You would think it would be counter productive for the borer to kill plants that fast. What happens to the little worm then? Maybe it can get out and be lucky enough to find another hospitable stem to bore in to, but that all sounds iffy. Those worms are very cozy in the first place because they hatch out from eggs laid right on the stem. They lose that advantage when they have to go find another one and become vulnerable to predation, dehydration, etc. Then that caterpillar never grows up to become a moth.

Survival of the reproductively fittest would seem to dictate that the ones with best survival odds would be able to sip juices off, without killing the plant or not very fast.

[Lindsaylew82]

Unless they have a very quick reproductive life cycle or their dependence on their host plant is short.

....I pretty much hate any type of caterpillar or grub this year. They're pretty much all jerks.

[applestar]

I'm going to collect links to other threads that were posted about other kinds of borers -- not just stems but fruits too -- and consolidate them in this thread for future reference.

Here's one about peppers

Subject: Hot Pepper Plant Bug

I think you have pepper maggots.

Scroll down in this article until you get to pepper maggot fly:

https://extension.umass.edu/vegetable/a ... per-maggot

[applestar]

Strawberry leaf:

Subject: They looked like beans -- fist seen strawberry pests

Found this.

Leaf petioles have galls

Petiole Galls occur periodically in strawberry fields, especially near weedy borders. One or more galls may occur per petiole. The greenish to reddish galls are 1 to 4 inches in length and somewhat segmented in appearance. Galls have 10 to 35 or more central chambers inside, each containing a small single white larva. The causal insect is not known. Petiole galls appear to have no serious economic impact on the plants.

https://www.fruit.cornell.edu/berrytool/ ... legall.htm

[applestar]

Cucumber:

Subject: Time To Replace Cucumbers?

Yes, it is a pickle worm. Usually you will find a small hole on the fruit where they were laid by the moth. Covering the fruit with a newspaper tube or mesh bag helps. I get them once in a while but thankfully not that often.

I have a different variety of cucumber in my garden now callled Tendergreen. It looks like an English cucumber and gets quite long and is non-bitter. It is performing well and is actually resisting mildew much better than Suyo.

https://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/veg/pickleworm.htm

[applestar]

SVB:

Subject: SVB IN the FRUITS?!

Is it so?! I keep finding what I think are SVB worms INSIDE my squash and zucchini. They've bored into my pumpkins, too.

SVB? Something else?


ETA: They are in my cucumbers, too. In the fruits AND THE VINES!

[applestar]

And here's the reason. I wanted to do this.
I found yet another -- this time in a bean. I saw a little round hole in the side of a bean so decided to investigate.

This guy was wedged inside the bean pod

I haven't positively ID'd it but this could be a legume pod borer

... What do you think?

[Lindsaylew82]

I don't think that's it. Everything I'm seeing for that looks like this...

image.jpg (19.69 KiB) Viewed 1597 times

Which happens to look exactly like my juvie pickle worms!

[rainbowgardener]

we seem to have lots of borers around! There's the stalk borer you identified at the beginning of this thread and then there is the pepper maggot I ID'd in the "hot pepper bug" thread, which is also all white.

[applestar]

I was looking at the photo again and wished I'd kept it in a jar to maturity... But I was tired and tossed it in a bucket of water.

It was a knee-jerk reaction because I AM on the lookout for been beetle larvae and silver spotted skipper leaf rollers -- ugh! SomethingELSE?!

[applestar]

Oh drat. It looks like it could have been a hairstreak or a blue butterfly caterpillar.
But I haven't found an exact match.

The caterpillars of both hairstreaks and blues look much the same: slug-like, usually with a repeating pattern of chevrons or broken stripes, and covered with very short hairs. Since they are small (10-15 mm), they are often very hard to find.

https://www.austinbug.com/lycaenidae.html

[rainbowgardener]

would a butterfly caterpillar have been inside the bean? That seems more like one of those borer type things. It seems like butterfly caterpillars are more usually leaf eaters.

For example: "Karner blue caterpillars only feed on wild blue lupine leaves," That's only one example, there are lots of different blues and hairstreaks, but I don't think you would find them inside beans.

[sheeshshe]

that would have been disgusting if you bit into that mean and felt a pop and a squish. eewwwwwwwwwwwwww!

[Lindsaylew82]

:::GAG:::

[applestar]

This morning's fun discovery was this little guy curled on the Zluta Kytice cherry tomato among other harvested ZK tomatoes in a wooden berry basket.

I was sorting the cherry tomatoes for "better eat today" and "gah! spoiled!" ones so it wasn't like
I tried to eat it. I put the fruit with the wormy-worm sitting on it in this white bowl, but when I came back to look at it later, it was gone! ...Then I realized it had crawled back inside the tomato

A little later, it had come out of hiding again, so I took this pic to share

[Lindsaylew82]

I had one of those on a brown berry yesterday... I wasn't sure what it was... It reminded me of a corn worm. I didn't have my phone so I didn't take a picture, but it looked a lot like your wormy worm.

[rainbowgardener]

the corn earworm and the tomato fruitworm are basically the same beast.

[sheeshshe]

wow. man. something else to look for when I eat things from the garden!

[Lindsaylew82]

I pulled all my older plantings of squash and finally the last if the zucchini. I broke off some stalks that were 2 inches thick! Slam full of SVB. I pulled them because they had powdery mildew so bad that the fruits were being infected.....and pickle worms.....they are worse than SVB in my opinion.

At any rate, my plants were not decimated by SVB. Although they WERE HEAVILY INFESTED, they showed no sign of it top side. Interesting.

One of the zucchini had a root system where 2 of its roots were 1" thick. I'm impressed! My garden tried really hard to overcome!

[applestar]

Too bad you don't have chickens. Seems like SVB would make great protein feed for them. Between them and hornworms (and maybe slugs too -- didn't you start out on the forum with slug hunting?) you wouldn't have to buy chicken feed at all. LOL MAKE SURE YOU MENTION THAT TO YOUR HUBBY.

[Lindsaylew82]

I'm totes workin that ish!

I found several large slugs tonight while pulling the last of the biggest zucchini. I didn't count mainly cause I had my 3 year old "helping" me. Kid has a SHARP eye and fearless grabbers! ( when she's not doting on the marigolds and pulling them off to put in her hair! Hehehe)