urgent bug ID needed - root aphid or not?

hi sorry for not putting these photos in other aphid threads but I don't know how to do it. just found these 2 fuckers, one in the soil and a little red thing that won't come out in a photo is a soil flush, and one in the fly paper. also white residue in soil and leaf damage.

can anyone give me a positive ID please so I can get some chemmies and nuke the little bastards to hell?

Your Issue

Your Issue

Hey Bruddah,

It looks for sure like the bugs you have caught are fungus gnats. I can't really see much in the soil pic but if you have small white larvae squirming around that is the fungus gnat larvae. They are very small and white with a black head. As for the leaves, sadly enough the speckling looks like spider mite damage, the brown edge looks like either a deficiency or nute burn, hard to tell on that without knowing more. I would check all the undersides of leaves if you see any speckling on top, underneath you would look for small, very small dots, that are most likely brownish in color. If you have those too, it is spider mites and fungus gnats.

As for root aphids, the flyers have a much more pronounced small round body and large wings. Most likely you will notice small greenish/tanish crawlers first if you have root aphids before you see the flyers. They will usually be crawling around pots or trays.

Hope this helps.

Yep fungus gnats.. Get sticky traps ( big yellow ones) and put them all over the room to catch the flying ones. they are laying eggs in your soil, so put a layer of sand or perlite on top of the soil so it makes it hard for them to lay more eggs. Put some drip pans under the pots and only water them from the bottom of the pot (thru the drip holes) this way the soil can dry out on top making it hard for the eggs to hatch. You need to drench the soil with Azatrol/Azamax or some Mosquito Dunks (not as effective) and you'll have to treat the soil at least 2 times. The eggs hatch in like 5 days so do these things ASAP, otherwise it gets out of control and you'll have a harder time getting rid of em. Good luck!

get some gnatral and some neem oil. good luck fixing your plants

its deffo not spider mites, I know all about them and there are no black specks underneath the leaves although there are some little yellow spots on the leaves. thought it was mg deficiency for ages but from reading other threads I see that is something that can occur from the root aphids.

in the soil it is not larvae but there are white areas that I thought could be droppings, mould or residue

aha! found some more pix and they are deffo fungus gnats.

don't think you can get gnatrol or azamx here in the UK but theres another product called gnat off with the same bt active ingredient and I just read you can get neem oil on ebay. my new questions now are how soon before harvest can you use these products, and what do you do to apply the neem oil as it appears its not sold here for our purposes.....

thanks for your help guys, had almost convinced myself it was root aphids so woulda got the wrong stuff