A pinprick on your arm while gardening does not usually bring thrips to mind. They are plant insects, after all, and most encounters happen while they are crawling through flowers […]

Thrips and spider mites can cause surprisingly similar damage to plants, but the pests themselves are very different. Thrips are tiny, slender insects with six legs, and most adults have […]

Thrips come in several colors rather than one standard shade. Depending on the species, sex, and life stage, they can appear white, cream, yellow, orange-yellow, tan, brown, dark brown, or […]

Thrips eggs are extremely small, pale eggs that are generally elongated, cylindrical, oval, or kidney-shaped, depending on the species. They are commonly translucent white, whitish, cream, or beige. However, you […]

Thrips and fungus gnats are both tiny insects commonly noticed around houseplants, but they look and behave quite differently. Thrips are narrow, elongated insects that usually spend their feeding stages […]

Thrips can turn a peaceful houseplant collection into a frustrating game of hide-and-seek. You clean a plant until no insects are visible, only to find tiny larvae on a new […]

An orchid sends up a promising flower spike, the buds begin to swell, and then something goes wrong. Buds develop a scorched appearance, petals open with pale scars or distorted […]

The answer changes considerably depending on what the thrips has landed on. A few thrips crawling across a person’s sleeve are usually little more than a nuisance, while the same […]

Something tiny and narrow is crawling across a leaf, but that alone does not make it a thrips. Several insects and other arthropods can resemble thrips when viewed without magnification, […]