Challenge your knowledge of effective chilli pest management strategies by identifying common sucking pests, their symptoms, and suitable control methods. This quiz aims to improve your skills in protecting chilli crops from major pests in horticultural systems.
When small, soft-bodied green or black insects cluster on the undersides of chilli leaves and excrete sticky honeydew, which sucking pest is most likely present?
Explanation: Aphids are small, sap-sucking insects, often green or black, and produce honeydew that attracts ants and encourages sooty mold. Fruit borers chew fruit rather than sucking sap, thrips are slender and typically cause silvery streaks, and root-knot nematodes attack roots, not leaves.
Curled, puckered leaves with visible tiny insects on chilli plants are commonly a result of which sucking pest?
Explanation: Whiteflies feed on plant sap and cause leaf curling and yellowing by transmitting viruses; adults are small, white, and fly when disturbed. Cutworms do not cause curling but chew stems, mites typically cause bronzing, and leaf miners create serpentine tunnels inside leaves.
Which principle guides chilli farmers to apply insecticides only when pest numbers reach a level that may cause significant yield loss?
Explanation: The economic threshold level helps optimize pest control actions by recommending interventions only when pest populations threaten profitable yields. Biological control uses natural enemies, resistant varieties involve plant breeding, and calendar spraying ignores pest presence.
In chilli pest management, releasing ladybird beetles helps control which sucking pest efficiently?
Explanation: Ladybird beetles are natural predators of aphids and consume large numbers, supporting integrated pest management (IPM). They do not impact Spodoptera larvae (leaf eaters), wireworms (root pests), or pepper weevils (fruit attackers).
What is a recommended practice when using insecticides to manage sucking pests in chilli crops?
Explanation: Rotating chemicals with different action modes reduces the risk of pest resistance and preserves chemical efficacy. Spraying at noon can increase phytotoxicity, overdosing is unsafe for plants and the environment, and spraying only in the rainy season is not effective against year-round pests.