The bougainvillea is my front yard looks really sad right now. The leaves exhibit scalloped, hole-y edges, something has definitely been munching on them. I suspect they are the appetizer, main course, and dessert for a very hungry bougainvillea looper, Disclisioprocta stellata.
D. stellata is a smooth-looking, yellow-green or brown caterpillar (the perfect colors to help it camouflage and evade predators). It is about an inch long. Loopers, also known as inchworms, belong to the family Geometridae. The “geometers” are earth-measurers. They move by arching and stretching, giving the impression that they are measuring their journey. This specific species is a world traveler, and can be found in sub-Saharan Africa, the islands of the Indian Ocean, eastern Canada, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Hawaii, and other destinations.
Although D. stellata seems to really love my bougainvillea, it is not a picky eater. As a polyphagous pest, it feeds on many different hosts, including ornamentals like lantana and malvas (such as Abutilon and Hibiscus) and crop plants like guava and citrus. Polyphagous pests are often more difficult to control and manage than those pests that eat just one plant type. They are sometimes able to evade different control interventions by switching hosts. They also harbor more complex digestive systems to handle the many types of plant toxins that they naturally encounter in their diets, and can sometimes leverage their diverse metabolic pathways to breakdown and withstand pesticides. The good news about this insect is that it won’t kill my plant, which is otherwise healthy and should withstand the damage. I assume that the coming cooler weather will slow down the looper and give the plant a chance to recover.
My best bet for controlling this looper in my bougainvillea is to deal with this issue….yesterday. Perhaps in late summer when I first started noticing damage would’ve been a good time. Regularly monitoring your garden plants lets you catch issues early and head them off. But I didn’t do that, and now I have a lot of bugs and a lot of damage. Hand removal is a good choice for gardeners, so maybe on my lunch break I’ll go out with a bucket filled with soapy water and drop them in there. Or maybe I won’t – I like how the adults look, and I don’t mind a bit of aesthetic damage to my ornamentals. Maybe we can share.
For other control strategies, including organic chemical options, check out this article.
