Papaya Tree Leaves Gone Bad

The new leaves on one of my papaya trees are coming in very disfigured, and are about half their former original healthy size. This began about three weeks ago, and is becoming progressively worse. Can anyone identify the disease, and if so a treatment, from the attached photo? (You can see some older leaves at the bottom and the upper right of the photo for comparison.)

(Actually, I have more "before" and "after" photos; but I didn't realize that I would be able to attach only one to this posting. Please ask if you would like to see them, and I will post them individually.)

Thank you very much for any assistance,
~~zapatero

Did you check for spider mites?

Thanks BBAustin. Yes, I sure did. No spider mites. In fact, no visible evidence of any insects.

Better send more photos. Someone will be able to identify what's harming your trees.

Above are two "after" shots, and here is a "before" shot. The difference is pretty striking, (especially since this healthy one is twice the diameter of those two diseased ones above.)

We have just finished an unusually wet monsoon season. I am wondering if this problem might be a consequence of too much water(?)


This message was edited Nov 14, 2007 8:48 AM

Is there any chance you can set your camera to a higher resolution mode and take some more pictures? With the resolution you have on these pictures it's a bit hard to tell what's going on (at least for me). I can sort of see that the leaves before and after don't look the same, but I can't see enough detail on the bad leaves to tell what's causing it.

Thanks for the reply, ecrane3,

Yeah, on closer inspection I can see what you mean. Actually, these were all taken with an 8MP camera. I reduced the resolution purposely because I presumed that Dave's webserver wouldn't accept that many bits. Can you please educate me regarding the policy -- or tell me where to look?

Anyway, trying to save a posting, I will attempt to send a full 8MP with this one, to see what happens. If it somewhere defaults to low-res, then I'll have to take some closeups. Please advise how it looks to you.

Thank you very much for your interest and assistance,
~~z

DG will automatically resize pics for you when you upload them, so there's no need for you to do anything (unless you're on dialup and it's taking you too long to upload them, then you might want to resize them just to help yourself out!)

That's definitely a much better picture--unfortunately I still can't help you with what's wrong but I'm sure someone else will recognize it. I think some insects can do damage like that, but I don't know which ones. If nobody here knows, you might also try posting that picture on the Garden Pests & Diseases forum, I don't think this is something that's specific to papayas so you may find someone there who's had it happen on other plants.