Wild Chilli Pests & Diseases
Conditions for disease development:
This occurs on fruit suddenly exposed to intense sunlight at high temperatures and high humidities. Sudden exposure may be due to loss of foliage cover, defoliation, or prolonged wilting. Also, breakage of branches due to rough handling during harvest or from heavy rains may expose fruit to sunscald.
Symptoms:
Affected areas are straw-colored or white, soft, sunken, and wrinkled. These dead areas form only on the side exposed to the sun, in contrast to blossom end rot where the symptoms will appear on unexposed areas as well.
The pictures below shows aphids that have been parasitized by a tiny beneficial wasp. Each of those aphid mummies will release more tiny wasps to attack additional aphids. Some of the images show empty aphid mummies with little oval exit doors made by the wasps as they emerge.
The wasps already have taken care of [nearly all] of the aphids, at least as effectively as most chemical pesticides might.
The advantage of biological controls like this is that they will continue to breed and automatically control new aphid outbreaks as they happen [that is, so long as there are at least a few aphids around for them to live on]. Some commercial greenhouses now deliberately grow containers of grasses infested with cereal aphids [ones that will only feed on grasses] so that there are always plenty of the parasites on hand to protect the crop plants.
