Twospotted spider mites love to consume crops, and if left unchecked they can literally suck the life out of your plants by piercing leaf tissue with their needle-like mouths and extracting the contents of plant cells. Here’s how to identify these crop-hungry critters that can create infestations that hurt your bottom line.
Identification
The appearance of your crops
The first sign of an infestation of the twospotted spider mite is typically a stippled appearance on the leaves of your crops—this may not always be so visible, though, on plants with thick leaves. As the insects feed and remove the contents of leaf cells, which includes the chlorophyll that colors the leaves green, heavily-infected foliage eventually turns pale, dries up, and falls away. Large infestations of the mites can severely defoliate or kill your crops.
Identifying the twospotted spider mite itself
Look for twospotted spider mites on the undersides of leaves and on stems—they’re easy to miss since their green or greenish-yellow (sometimes brown or orangey-red) oval-shaped bodies are a mere 1/50th of an inch long and barely visible with the naked eye. Because of their size they can look like tiny spots. You’ll need to use a magnifying glass.
The abdomens of the bugs have two distinctive dark spots—hence the “twospotted” spider mite. Male twospotted spider mites are smaller and more active than females and they have narrower bodies with more pointed abdomens and larger legs. Females lay translucent, spherical eggs in silk webbing on the undersides of leaves—a practice that’s characteristic of their membership in the spider family, hence their name. Eggs that go unfertilized develop into males, and females emerge from fertilized eggs.
Another way to identify these insects is to hold a piece of blank white paper under the leaves of your plants, vigorously shake the branches or stems, and allow the mites to fall onto the paper. There you’ll be able to more easily observe and identify them using a magnifying glass.
