Brown soft scale
 

Hello,

I recently purchased a somewhat sickly paphiopedilum on eBay. One of the yellow leaves had turned brown, but I noticed the formation of scab structures underneath the leaf. I took it to my school where I put it under the microscope and identified it as brown soft scale. I am not familiar with the pest and am worried it may spread to other plants and cause harm. Should I treat the whole plant as infected?

Thank you for your time and help,

Nicolas D. Perez

soft scale or citrus soft scale can be removed manually and the plant can be treated with a systemic insecticide. this pest is extremely persistent and needs to be checked daily. it also spreads rapidly to other plants, so best practice would be to isolate this one. You can also spray the plant with insecticidal soap solution weekly. good luck!

ouch, haven't seen one of those in years and hope never to see them again!

to echo what svkl said, i had an outbreak of these about 15 years ago on a group of ficus bonsai i had. my go to soap spray did nothing (i suspected because they were encapsulated in that capsule) and manual removal never got ahead of it.

definitely isolate that plant and manually remove as much as you can as soon as you can. keep a really close eye on your other plants to see if any show up. may want to apply some sort of insecticide, which i never, ever recommend!

edit to add, i would actually send it back to the person and ask for a refund. probly not even ask for a replacement cause it may have them as well....they were very pervasive when i had them

these things suck, literally and figuratively. best of luck....

I agree you should get a refund. Be persistent.

I have successfully treated this scale with a multi-hours complete immersion of the entire plant, pot and media in very slightly soapy water - just enough to form a few bubbles. I invert the plant into the container of water so less medium floats out, and set a weight on the inverted pot. I treat for about 12 hours. I have not found this to harm the plant unless there are lots of punctures from insects.

They just showed up pretty recently and I have manually removed all of them. I am checking it frequently, but would isopropyl alcohol work in place of an insecticide?

Thank you for your time and help,

Nicolas D. Perez

---------- Post added at 08:38 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:32 PM ----------

How unfortunate :_(, I guess this is the price I must pay for trying to buy a cheap paph with long petals. I have it isolated currently, and I will definitely look into a refund; I am not sure I am ready to give up just yet though. Do you happen to know how they spread? Can they fly to infect plants or do they need to crawl across touching leaves?

Thank you again,

Nicolas D. Perez

---------- Post added at 08:40 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:38 PM ----------

Ok perfect, I will definitely try to soak the orchid in soap water. Thank you for your help.

Scale crawl. Eggs hatch under the mother's shell and larvae crawl off to other places. They don't crawl as far nor as fast as do mealy bugs but they do get around. Mealy bugs often lay eggs in egg cases far from plants.

yup, they are crawlers. most of the time i tried manual removal, the capsule was already dry and empty. so not sure how long the gestation is and how quickly they hatch once momma forms the little pod, but it seemed i rarely got a live fleshy one. so, if you plan on keeping the plant just be extremely vigilant!! still i think you are due for a refund...

Thank you everyone for you help and telling me to quarantine the orchid. I treated it with alcohol 2 days ago, and yesterday there were several tiny ones. I think the remaining eggs may have hatched but I manually removed all of them. There are significantly fewer today, but I will continue to keep an eye on it.

And don't give up on treating the plant... one is NOT done. You need to zap the successive generations. So you'll need to treat at least once a week for a month or more.