Moringa — Pests and diseases

Metadata research draftEvidence limits

⚠️ Status: drafted from the metadata-level literature survey. The direct crop-specific pest set is thin, and many retrieved “moringa disease” records study moringa extracts against pests of other crops — those are not evidence about growing moringa. Values Unknown until source notes/full text.

Insects

• Defoliator caterpillar Noorda blitealis: the clearest direct pest candidate — a fertilization trial on moringa recorded the severity of caterpillar attack alongside yield (candidate 10.47604/ija.2977). Management lessons for Mexican gardens — Unknown.
• General defoliation or sucking-pest pressure on young trees and dense leaf stands — Unknown.

Nematodes

• Plant-parasitic nematodes are documented as associated with the moringa rhizosphere, including root-knot nematode Meloidogyne and other genera, in a Nigeria survey (candidate 10.15547/ast.2021.02.031). Whether they matter in Mexican home-garden soils — Unknown.

Diseases

• A direct moringa-disease profile (leaf spots, root and trunk rots, wilts) — Unknown; the sweep found few crop-specific candidates.
• Exclusion: studies applying moringa leaf/seed extracts to pathogens of other crops — e.g., moringa extract against gray mold of tomato (10.1590/1519-6984.233173) — document the extract, not a moringa pest. They stay out of this page’s evidence.

Birds, rodents, and weeds

• Bird and rodent pressure on pods and seeds, and weed competition in young stands — Unknown/Needs experiment; no strong academic coverage in the sweep.

Mexico / small-scale relevance

• A locally validated pest/disease calendar for Mexican home gardens is an extension gap (research/moringa/report.md §3.6). What dominates on one household tree vs a dense repeatedly cut leaf stand — Unknown.

Structured-data impact

• Pests/diseases documented narratively; not yet in the structured schema.