Do you have landscape plants that the leaves are stippled or showing yellow sickly spots and a few leaves are twisted as though they are wilting? You may even notice a few little white spots on some of the leaves and stems. You may have an infestation of the scale insect. The scale insect sucks fluids out of the plant, so the plant can die from lack of food and water, even though there is plenty of water and sunlight.

 

Those little white spots are actually young mobile scale insects in the "crawler" stage. The "adult" scale insect, which as you can see look as though they part of the plant's stem, are attached to the stem and lay eggs which hatch under the adult's outer shell. The young immature scale are called nymphs and in its early stages in mobile, the "crawler" stage that moves to other parts of the plant. As you can see, these Euonymus plants are infested. The good news is we can control this insect, but it will probably require several applications of a pesticide, organic or non-organic.