USDA Confirms Texas' First Redbanded Thrips, Found on Houston Sweetgums

The shortlist for a sick sweetgum is boring, and arborists usually like it that way. Lace bugs. Maybe a common thrips. Something that has a fact sheet, a spray window and a spray.

What came back to a Houston tree-care company this month was none of those. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has confirmed redbanded thrips — Selenothrips rubrocinctus — from sweetgums in Harris County, a species its records had placed in the continental United States only in Florida.

Eric Putnam BCMA Inc., which does arborist consulting, tree care and plant health care around Houston, said it received the identification Oct. 5 and understands the finding to be a new state record for Texas. The specimens behind it were collected Sept. 9 in Houston: 15 immatures and 15 adults, sorted out by a National Taxonomic Specialist with USDA's National Identification Services. The company said a corrected federal notification covering the state-record designation is still pending — the paperwork, not the insect, is what's lagging.

Getting there took a chain of people who mostly weren't paid for it. Arborists had walked into sweetgums showing odd feeding damage, dark spotting and premature leaf loss, the kind of symptoms that usually get blamed on something local. Anderson Gonzales photographed several life stages on the leaves and worked with Shane Krajnik on a tentative call. Avery Henderson, the company's lead plant health care technician, gathered material. James Boone Holladay at the Galveston County office of Texas A&M AgriLife Extension connected the crew to specialists, and earlier identifications passed through Wizzie Brown and Texas A&M University entomology before USDA signed off.

Redbanded thrips feed in groups on leaf undersides, and the damage they leave — scarring, spotting, foliage dropped early — is not subtle even when the insect is. That is roughly the same profile Texas got to know a year ago from a different species. AgriLife Extension released a fact sheet on short-spined thrips, Thrips parvispinus, on Sept. 30, a pest confirmed in the Dallas area in late 2025 and already a greenhouse and nursery concern. Two new thrips in about twelve months is not a pattern anyone can yet call a trend, but it is two more names for the same set of symptoms.

How far this one has spread is an open question, and the company is careful to say so. Its staff have since seen the insect on sweetgum and common persimmon across their service area, with the farthest reported locations about 72 miles apart. The map they published shows where they looked, not a survey — no total case count, no measured rate of spread. Texas A&M University entomologists and USDA are treating it as a find worth documenting rather than an outbreak worth mapping.

Documentation is where it's headed. USDA entomologist Xanthe Shirley advised the company that the submitted specimens would likely end up in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History insect collection, and the company is coordinating with the Texas A&M University Insect Collection. According to Lindsey Stone, it will most likely co-author a Texas A&M Forest Service fact sheet on the species.

For a homeowner, the useful part is narrower than the story. If a tree is losing leaves with dark spotting and no obvious cause, photograph both sides of the affected leaves and get an identification from a qualified arborist or a county Extension office before treating anything. The symptoms that started this one have plenty of other explanations, and most of them are cheaper to fix.