Hello and welcome to On the Ledge podcast, the podcast for people who love their plants.

This week's show is dedicated to the topic of, brace yourselves, thrips. Yes, that pest which we've all come to fear, comes under the beady eye of On the Ledge this week.

So get your hand lenses at the ready.

This one is not for the faint-hearted.

Plus, I answer a question about whether a plant can recover from cat-related damage.

Oh dear, Pussy's got her claws out.

Hello, I'm William Kirk.

I'm a professor of applied entomology at Keel University in the UK,

and I've been studying the biology of thrips for exactly 40 years this year.

Now, there is no such thing as a Thrip.

That's right. You'll see lots of people mentioning it, but it's a sort of false assumption

that the singular is Thrip, whereas in fact it's from a Greek word, which ends in the letter

Psi, which is a Pss sound. So we're stuck, unfortunately,

with the singular of thrips being thrips. So it does seem a bit strange when if you talk about

one thrips or a-thrips, I've seen A-thrips, but that is strictly correct. Yeah, it's a bit like

data, isn't it? I think that's another word that

scientists always always have to have to struggle with. I think that this is going to probably

trip me up. So I apologize in advance if I say Thrip, but I'm going to try to say Thrips throughout.

Now, this is a pest of houseplants that is present everywhere in the world as far as I know.

Are we dealing with one species or lots of different species on our house plants?

We're dealing with lots of species.

In fact, in the world, there are known 6,000 species,

...