page_title: Thrips
section_title: Damage to plants
hierarchical_section_title: Thrips / Biology / Damage to plants
caption_attribution_description: Plate XXXVII.— THYSANOPTERA. X
context_page_description: Thrips are minute, slender insects with fringed wings and unique asymmetrical mouthparts. Different thrips species feed mostly on plants by puncturing and sucking up the contents, although a few are predators. Entomologists have described approximately 6,000 species. They fly only weakly and their feathery wings are unsuitable for conventional flight; instead, thrips exploit an unusual mechanism, clap and fling, to create lift using an unsteady circulation pattern with transient vortices near the wings.
  Many thrips species are pests of commercially important crops. A few species serve as vectors for over 20 viruses that cause plant disease, especially the Tospoviruses. Some species of thrips are beneficial as pollinators or as predators of other insects or mites. In the right conditions, such as in greenhouses, many species can exponentially increase in population size and form large swarms because of a lack of natural predators coupled with their ability to reproduce asexually, making them an irritation to humans.
context_section_description: Thrips can cause damage during feeding. This impact may fall across a broad selection of prey items, as there is considerable breadth in host affinity across the order, and even within a species, varying degrees of fidelity to a host. Family Thripidae in particular is notorious for members with broad host ranges, and the majority of pest thrips come from this family. For example, Thrips tabaci damages crops of onions, potatoes, tobacco, and cotton.
  Some species of thrips create galls, almost always in leaf tissue. These may occur as curls, rolls or folds, or as alterations to the expansion of tissues causing distortion to leaf blades. More complex examples cause rosettes, pouches and horns. Most of these species occur in the tropics and sub-tropics, and the structures of the galls are diagnostic of the species involved. A radiation of thrips species seems to have taken place on Acacia trees in Australia; some of these species cause galls in the petioles, sometimes fixing two leaf stalks together, while other species live in every available crevice in the bark. In Casuarina in the same country, some species have invaded stems, creating long-lasting woody galls.
caption: Eusocial colonies of Kladothrips cause and live in galls on Acacia trees.
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