Banded palm thrips
A slender, blackish-brown thrips under 2 mm long with banded brown-and-white wings. It lives year-round on houseplants and glasshouse plants with tough leaves, including palms, Ficus, Dracaena, Schefflera and Monstera. Adults and larvae feed on the leaves, which turn dull and silvery with dark specks of excrement. The RHS warns that damaged leaves never regain their green, so act on the first silvered patch, not the tenth.
Adult Parthenothrips dracaenae with its banded wings beside pale larvae. Photo: pending.
Identification
Adults are narrow, up to 2 mm long, and blackish-brown, with two pairs of strap-like wings fringed with hairs. The forewings are the tell. They are banded brown and white, and under magnification they carry a net-like (reticulate) pattern; the Thrips of California key notes that no other thrips is known with such distinctive forewings. The lower legs and feet are yellow, paler than the brown body and thighs. Larvae are creamy yellow and paler than the adults.
Look on the leaves, not in the flowers. Thrips are usually more numerous on the undersides, and this species spends its whole life on the leaf, pupating there too. It usually breeds without males: populations studied in the lab were all female (thelytokous), though the Thrips of California key also describes a male. An unmated female can start a colony, so a single thrips on a new plant is enough.
Easily confused with
- Western flower thripsAlso a pestWestern flower thrips feeds mostly in buds, flowers and growing tips (UC IPM). Banded palm thrips is blackish-brown with brown-and-white banded, net-patterned forewings that no other thrips shares, and lives on tough leaves all year (RHS; Thrips of California).
- Two-spotted spider miteAlso a pestMites leave fine pale mottling on the upper leaf and, later, silk webbing. Thrips leave dull, silvery patches dotted with dark varnish-like excrement, with no webbing (RHS).
Damage symptoms
Adults and larvae feed on the leaf surface, most often underneath. Leaves turn increasingly dull or silvery, and the RHS says banded palm thrips can cause extensive silvering. The larvae's excrement soils the leaves, which the Thrips of California key notes is most obvious on small palms kept in the home. The damage is cosmetic but permanent: the RHS warns that leaves will not regain their green colour once it is lost, even after the thrips have gone. It is not known to spread plant viruses; in lab work on tomato spotted wilt virus it was used as the non-vector comparison.
- Dull, silvery patches on the leaves, where thrips are most numerous on the undersides
- Dark, varnish-like specks of excrement in the silvered areas
- Soiled, speckled leaves on palms and other tough-leaved plants
- Silvered leaves that stay pale after the thrips are gone
Lifecycle & degree days
Indoors it breeds all year round (RHS). The sources give no development times for this species, so none are published here. Two things about its biology matter for control. It usually reproduces without males, so a female needs no mate to start a colony. And the pupae stay on the foliage instead of dropping into the compost (Thrips of California), so compost-dwelling predators and drenches aimed at soil pupae are unlikely to reach it.
- Season
- All year indoors and under glass
- Reproduction
- Mostly females only (thelytokous); a male is described
- Pupates
- On the leaf, not in the compost
- Development time
- Not published for this species
Host crops
Plants with relatively tough leaves, in the home or under glass. The RHS names Ficus, Dracaena, Citrus, Monstera, Schefflera and palms; the Thrips of California key adds the kentia palm (Howea forsteriana) in particular, and maidenhair ferns. Citrus is on the RHS list as a glasshouse or indoor plant; no source names it as a pest of citrus grown outdoors.
Monitoring & action thresholds
No source gives a number. Because silvered leaves never recover, the practical rule on a houseplant is to act at the first silvered patch and isolate the plant.
Inspect new plants before they join the others, and keep them apart for a while where you can, since pests usually arrive on new purchases (RHS). Check the undersides of the leaves with a hand lens, looking for the dark adults, pale larvae and varnish-like specks, and keep checking the newest leaves often, so you can act before numbers build (RHS).
Biological control
We found no published trial of any predator against banded palm thrips itself, so the choices below rest on general thrips advice. The RHS lists predatory mites, the predatory bug Orius laevigatus and a rove beetle as the biological controls for thrips under glass and on indoor plants. Because this species pupates on the leaf rather than in the compost, the foliage predators are the logical ones: Amblyseius cucumeris and Amblyseius swirskii, which eat young thrips larvae (Koppert), and Orius laevigatus, which the RHS lists for glasshouses and which feeds on larvae and adults (Koppert). The compost predators the RHS also names (Stratiolaelaps, Dalotia) hunt thrips pupae in the growing medium, which this species avoids.
Cultural controls
On a few houseplants, physical control and prevention go a long way. The damage already done will not recover, so the aim is clean new leaves.
- Inspect new plants, and quarantine them away from the rest where possible
- Isolate an infested plant so the thrips cannot move to its neighbours
- Check and treat the leaf undersides, where thrips are most numerous
- Remove badly silvered leaves if you want the plant to look right; they will not green up
- Judge progress by the new leaves, not by the old damage
Chemical, last resort
Sources
RHS, Thrips (advice page, accessed 2026)
RHS, Indoor plants: sap-feeding insects (advice page, accessed 2026)
Hoddle, Mound & Paris, Thrips of California (Lucid key, 2012): Parthenothrips dracaenae
Kumm & Moritz, Wolbachia in arrhenotokous thrips, Environ. Entomol. 2008
Kikkert et al., Binding of TSWV to a 94-kDa thrips protein, Phytopathology 1998
UC IPM, Thrips: floriculture and ornamental nurseries (pest management guidelines, accessed 2026)
Koppert, Thripex, Swirski-Mite and Thripor-L product pages (accessed 2026)
Page status
Drafted from the sources below, then checked claim by claim against those sources on 23 September 2026.
Suggest a correction →Banded palm thrips by crop
The same pest behaves differently on different hosts. Each page below gives the host-specific control, rate and threshold.