10 Common Houseplant Pests—and How to Get Rid of Them For Good
You may be more worried about the variety of pests and diseases that can impact your outdoor garden, but your houseplants can also fall victim to a variety of different insects that can cause damage or just give you the ick when you find them.
Ready to do battle against any houseplant invaders? Learn what to look for to see if you have indoor plant pests, get a look at the most common offenders, and learn how to treat plants now—and prevent infestations in the future.
How to Identify the Signs of Indoor Plant Pests
We have images below of the most common critters you’ll see on your houseplants, so you can help ID any insects that you see on your plants. But if you aren’t checking your plants regularly, you may spot signs of damage from these houseplant pests. You’ll want to watch for changes to your plant’s leaves, whether it’s spots or discoloration, misshapen or even chewed leaves, and leaves that are yellowing or dropping.
How to Prevent Plant Pests
The best way to head off damage to your beloved plants? Make sure that the pests never make it into your house in the first place. While you can’t entirely stop the spread of some insects that might find their way into your house, you can do a lot to help reduce your risks.
Inspect Plants Before You Buy
When you’re shopping, Lalicata recommends giving the plants a complete inspection. She recommends checking both the tops and undersides of the leaves, including the stems.
“If you’re ordering plants online like most plant parents nowadays, inspect the plant in a quarantined area upon arrival,” she suggests. “Only bringing in plants that are pest free will help to reduce transmission to other plants, as well as ensure you’re choosing one that is happy and healthy from the start.”
Avoid Bringing Outdoor Plants Inside
You may be tempted to bring outdoor plants in when the weather cools, but according to Lalicata, it can be a risky endeavor, as they’d be more exposed to potential contamination.
Consider Quarantining or Pretreating
When you do bring a new plant into your collection, it pays to keep it away from your other plants for two weeks—and even pre-treat it for pests before you bring it in with the rest of your plants. Lalicata suggests doing this even if there are no signs of insects.
“This is because pests and their eggs and larvae may be microscopic—looking at you spider mites—and can easily be missed,” she says. “You can treat your plant with an insecticidal soap or neem oil, and quarantine it to ensure there are no signs of pests appearing.”
Keep Your Plants Healthy
Stronger plants equals fewer opportunities for pests and other diseases to take hold. “Healthiness of the plant is key,” Rouxel says. “Plants that are healthy are going to be able to fight against pests, while weaker plants will attract pests.”
Check In Weekly
“Some plants attract more pests than others, so pay close attention to those,” Lalicata says.
Try a Monthly Treatment Schedule
Even if your plants don’t have pests now, there’s always a chance an insect can sneak into your home and start an infestation. “Get into the habit of treating your plants biweekly to monthly depending on the size of your collection,” Lalicata suggests. You can apply neem oil or another insecticidal soap to do the job.
Common Houseplant Pests and How to Get Rid of Them
Most of the common household plant pests live off your plant’s sap like vegetarian vampires—and can cause scarring, spotting, and other damage to your plant leaves. Here’s what the most common ones look like, how to spot an infestation, and what to do to give these pests the heave-ho.
Aphids
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“If you’re looking for the most common culprit for houseplant damage, aphids are it,” Rouxel says. But you might need to break out the magnifying glass to find them, as they’re under a quarter-inch long at their biggest. There are several species of aphids that differ in color—most common are light green, yellow, white, black, brown, gray, or pink.
Aphids live under the plant’s leaves and feed on the plant’s sap. You may only notice they’re there when your plant’s leaves and stems turn black from sooty mold, which thrives on the waste that aphids produce after they’ve sapped the strength from your plant.
How to Get Rid of Aphids
To remove aphids, you’ll want to give your plant a good rinse to physically remove as many pests as possible. (You can spray the leaves or rinse it thoroughly in the sink to get rid of them.)
After you clear away as many as you can this way, apply neem oil or black soap and baking soda—and reapply for several weeks to ensure you’ve got them all.
Brown Scale
Another ultra-common culprit for plant damage is brown scale, a little brown pest that can look like an inconspicuous bump on a stem or leaf—so they often hide in plain sight.
How to Get Rid of Brown Scale
The tricky part of getting rid of brown scale is that they have hardened shells that can help protect them from some insecticides. So the best strategy is actually wiping them away. “Scale insects usually need to be manually scraped off a plant,” Lalicata says.
After you’ve scraped as many as you can, use a systemic insecticide that they’ll ingest to kill off any remaining bugs. You can use a sponge or a toothbrush with a mild soap to do the job.
You may want to follow up with a spray as well. “You’ll want to still spray down the plant with an insecticide since there may be eggs orlarvae which can be killed with a spray since they haven’t created the hard shell yet.”
Fungus Gnats
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This common houseplant pest will annoy you more than it damages your plants. “Fungus gnats may not harm our houseplants but they wouldn’t be considered beneficial and can certainly be a nuisance,” Lalicata says. “They are like the fruit flies of the plant world.” But the larvae can do some damage to your plant roots, so it’s worth your while to nip an infestation in the bud.
You’ll find these tiny flying insects—which look like mini mosquitoes and have a dark or black body—swarming around your houseplants or a nearby window.
How to Get Rid of Fungus Gnats
Yellow sticky traps will be your friend when it comes to getting rid of fungus gnats, as they attract and snare adult gnats. To make your plants less palatable to the gnats, make sure you’re not overdoing it with your watering—they thrive in a moist environment.
Mealybugs
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Another of the most common insects that’ll infect your plants, mealybugs are tiny white or gray insects (no more than 1/5-inch) that are hard to spot until they become a white mass on your plant’s leaves, or leave a sticky residue behind. Like aphids, the mealybugs feed on your plant’s sap and can cause sooty mold.
How to Get Rid of Mealybugs
Treating an infestation with neem oil will help. If you catch the infestation early enough, you can also cut away any stems or leaves that are affected, rub them away with a cotton ball soaked in a solution of three parts isopropyl alcohol and one part water (test an inconspicuous spot first to ensure it won’t damage your plant’s leaves), and keep the infested plant away from others so they can’t spread.
Slugs
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These slimy little pests eat holes in your plant’s leaves, and leave tracks of mucus behind them. Lalicata says this one is rare to spot in a houseplant, unless it’s been outdoors for a while.
How to Get Rid of Slugs
There’s an easy solve if you find these slow-moving and sizable plant pests on your favorites—just pick them up and dispose of them. Coffee grounds in the soil can make your plants less palatable to them, too.
Snails
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Snails are far more common on outdoor plants, so you’ll likely only see them if you’re bringing in an outdoor plant for the winter. They thrive on humidity, so you’ll find them in plants that require a steady watering schedule—or ones you’ve overwatered. They’re chewers, so you’ll see torn or chewed edges on your leaves if you have them.
How to Get Rid of Snails
Just like slugs, these large and slow-moving invaders are easy to just pluck off your plants and give them a new home outdoors.
Spider Mites
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These common houseplant pests can be really hard to spot because they’re so tiny—they’ll look like little moving dots on your plants. The first sign of an infestation is often the webs they build on your plants, which give the spider mites their name. (Though they aren’t technically spiders, they are from the same class—arachnids—as spiders.)
Like many other houseplant pests, spider mites suck the sap out of your plants, damaging the leaves.
How to Get Rid of Spider Mites
Neem oil can kill off spider mites, but you can also just give your plant’s leaves a good wipe down with water every few days to remove mites and eggs.
Springtails
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You might get the ick from seeing these tiny bugs around your houseplants, but Lalicata says they’re harmless. “They may be considered a pest to the plant parent if bugs in the home unsettle them, but they are actually beneficial insects that aerate the soil and break down organic matter which release more nutrients for plants,” she explains.
Springtails are usually less than 1/8-inch long and brown, gray, or black. You’ll likely find them in moist soil.
How to Get Rid of Springtails
You can remove them with a shop vac or by hand—or use neem oil. To encourage them to move elsewhere, manage your watering to avoid the overly moist soil that they thrive in.
Thrips
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Thrips are small, winged insects that suck the sap from your plants. They’re less than 1/20-inch long and can be yellow, white, brown, or black. If these common plant pests infest your favorites, you’ll find scarring or pale spots on the leaves where they bite into them.
How to Get Rid of Thrips
Rinsing your plant and using repellent sprays can help remove a population of thrips. And making sure that dead leaves and other organic matter is kept out of your plant’s soil can help ensure that they don’t make your favorite houseplants their home.
Whiteflies
These super-small white bugs can be hard to see, as they hide under the leaves and suck the sap from your plant. They’re flying insects, so you might see them fly off your plant if you give it a good shake.
How to Get Rid of Whiteflies
Give your plant a good rinse to remove as many whiteflies as possible, then use yellow sticky traps to attract any ones that remain. Insecticidal soap and neem oil can also help decimate the whitefly population.
