Root aphids or fungus gnats??

pulpoinspace said:

I got fungus gnats, root aphids, or soil mites, some combination of the three.

At first I thought they were just fungus gnats but now I'm questioning myself. I managed to pluck a TINY crawler from the soil and it looks to me like a root aphid nymph or a soil mite, def not gnat larvae. But the flyers look more like gnats. What do u guys think? Plants look fine for now.

heres a video of the crawler i plucked from the soil crawling on a piece of paper.

Right now the plan is to either do a H202 or spinosad root drench but looking for opinions before i do anything.

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pulpoinspace said:

I got fungus gnats, root aphids, or soil mites, some combination of the three.

At first I thought they were just fungus gnats but now I'm questioning myself. I managed to pluck a TINY crawler from the soil and it looks to me like a root aphid nymph or a soil mite, def not gnat larvae. But the flyers look more like gnats. What do u guys think? Plants look fine for now.

heres a video of the crawler i plucked from the soil crawling on a piece of paper.

Right now the plan is to either do a H202 or spinosad root drench but looking for opinions before i do anything.

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Renfro said:

Use gnatrol, mosquito dunks or other BTI based product and you won't harm beneficial bugs.

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pulpoinspace said:

I got fungus gnats, root aphids, or soil mites, some combination of the three.

At first I thought they were just fungus gnats but now I'm questioning myself. I managed to pluck a TINY crawler from the soil and it looks to me like a root aphid nymph or a soil mite, def not gnat larvae. But the flyers look more like gnats. What do u guys think? Plants look fine for now.

heres a video of the crawler i plucked from the soil crawling on a piece of paper.

Right now the plan is to either do a H202 or spinosad root drench but looking for opinions before i do anything.

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PadawanWarrior said:

Are you in soil?

Is it organic?

That's looks like a beneficial mite predator like a hypoaspis miles which is your friend. Their favorite food is fungus gnats. So if you have some of these good guys in your soil and the gnats start reproducing, then the mites will go into overdrive and have massive babies.

Hypoaspis miles kick ass. Don't kill them with H2O2 or something else. I freaked out at first too when I saw them, but we're pals now.

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Renfro said:

The fliers are fungus gnats for sure.

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Kaotic said:

If your growing soil and your using hard water not soft you could be locking out the calcium on those plants from the ph being off

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PadawanWarrior said:

I forgot to mention that, lol.

BTI is your friend too, but I haven't actually had to add it.

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pulpoinspace said:

It really looks like it is hypoaspis miles. But is that possible given I have only ever used promix? Are these things commonly naturally occuring? Did they come in the mix? I'm kind of mind blown haha.

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pulpoinspace said:

nah it’s just promix hp. So peat perlite and dolomite lime. And I haven’t used any organic nutes or dry amendments. Just house and garden Aqua flakes and Epsom salts.

I don’t even have many fungus gnats the sticky cards only have 1-2 gnats each. So it’s amazing to me that these gnat eaters could possibly be in there working on it already. Seems to good to be true haha. But the pictures look just like the video I took.

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