I have cut this pear off of our ‘Honeysweet’ pear tree due to this pear infestation ‘whatever it is’, it looks like worms to me does anyone recognize what the pest is @clarkinks @alan
Luckily I have not seen this on any of the other pears
This looks like cedar rust. You can spray with a fungicide early in spring to prevent it. I don’t normally see new infections at this point where I’m at though.
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Thank you. It was only on one fruit and has not spread, so for this year I should not have to worry.
None of the cedars that we have had on our property has shown signs of rust, and we had the stumps removed a while ago, yet our neighbor’s yard is like a woods and I am sure that at least some of their trees are cedar. The house is rented out to people, and the owners live in California.
That is quince rust. Not the cedar rust.
Rust Diseases of Apples and Pears » Tree Fruit Diseases: Observations and Archives.
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Thank you, I just looked it up, what you are talking about is called ‘cedar-quince rust’, ‘quince’ and ‘Eastern Red Cedar’ are what usually hosts the ‘Gymnosporangium clavipes’ fungus that causes the disease. Which makes sense since I highly doubt that there are any ‘quince’ in our area.
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What I meant was that it was not the typical cedar apple rust, which is more common and pears get that CAR, too.
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In all my years of growing I’ve never seen that on a pear fruit and I don’t even spray to control pear rust because it is a minor pest in my region and has yet to cause anything more than cosmetic damage. I’m glad you only found it on that single pear- looks frightening at that magnification.
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Yes, I certainly got two awesome photos of it, better than anything I found on the internet. I have a 27mm wide-angle lens automatic camera, with 18x optical zoom, and I get as close as I can to the object without getting a blur or a shadow, then I zoom in as much as I can without getting blur. That is the way I take all my leaf, fruit, and flower photos.
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If my eyes could do the same, the photos would help me identify the pests you ask about. However, I always find photos a little difficult to interpret. Yours did create an image that looked liked thousands of nauseating worms.
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@alanmercieca I’m in central NC too, and I have the same rust issues on most of my pears this year too. In past years, I’ve occasionally seen one or two fruit that were affected by it but nothing like this year. I wonder if the late frosts this year made the pears extra susceptible. My Magness pear is the only one that doesn’t have any rust on the fruit, and it bloomed later than my other pears.
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