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Disease
Diseases in plants are as similar as diseases in animals and human. We cannot see the actual organism responsible for disease but we feel and see the symptoms.
Disease can be described as “any deviation from the normal behavior in a living organism is called a disease", different living organisms have different diseases and different microbes cause different diseases.”
Disease symptoms
Symptoms are expressions of the diseases, in plant diseases based on these symptoms only we can diagnose the diseases.
There are different symptoms expressed based on the type of the casual organism either in human or plants. For example in Human we’ll get different diseases to legs, stomach, eyes, throat, mouth just like that in plants also they’ll be infected with different diseases for different parts of the plant.
Difference between insect damage and disease:
Just like insects, diseases in plants attack them and damage the crop, the damage due to diseases may occur at any stage of the crop either on standing crop or in the post harvest, storage. There is decrease in yield due to insect damage but diseases can reduce the quality of the produce along with the yield reduction.
Why should we know about plant diseases?
It is difficult to identify or diagnose the diseases, when we see in the field there would be lot of confusion, if the field gets dried at one place, it may be due to insect damage or due to nutrient deficiency or due to disease. In this situation we should know the basic things about diseases and how they cause damage.
How do plants get the diseases?
Just like human beings and animals plants also get the diseases through the microbes. Microbes are not visible to the naked eye but we can see only the symptoms. There are different micro-organisms that causes diseases in plants.
- Fungus
- Bacteria
- Nematodes
- Virus
Types of diseases
Non infectious diseases:
These are due to changes in the environmental conditions, nutrition deficiency just like Zn deficiency in paddy fields, Water logging these also look like diseases but the symptoms never spread from one plant to other plants. These are also called abiotic diseases.
Infectious diseases:
Infection starts at one place of the field and spread to the entire field. These are basically caused by different microbes. Ex; if you see the blast disease in rice, the infection start at one plant or leaf but when there is favorable conditions, the infection totally spread to the entire field or the region.
