Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Unidentified disease??

  • When I visited Sabah last year, I found something which is very unusual / rare to me. I don't know whether to call it a disease infection or it is caused by something else. Some said it is caused by the strong wind but my sense doubt about that reason.
(Picture A)
Picture B
  • From the picture, we can compare shoots of the palms have collapsed from different reasons. Picture A showed that there was no twisted shoots involved where the shoots was collapsed. This palm was surrounded by neighbouring palm which did not copy the same situation. Therefore, it was not significant to justify that's the shoots collapsed because of a strong wind.
  • In another hand, Picture B showed twisted shoots caused by a strong wind and furthermore, this palm located near the field road. Therefore, the parameter of a shoots collapsed by a strong wind was obvious in this picture.
  • I've asked the agronomist about this problem and they said it may happen because of the over pruning. I don't know about that but I am not 100% agree with that reason. I have climbed the palm (yes!) to check any high moisture level present at the basal of the shoots (for bacterial infection) but unfortunately I cant hardly detected anything. At that time, I wanted to cut down the collapsed shoots in order to get more details however time was restricted.
  • The plantation manager has said to me that it was a rare problem but it's keep on increasing. Therefore, I can said that it's going to be more threatening in the future if we can't find the source of this problem. By the way, recently, I also found this problem in peninsular Malaysia.

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