DISEASES OF COCONUT 183 



Bud Rot in General 



A great deal of confusion exists among agriculturists regarding 

 coconut bud- rot, and pathologists cannot yet claim to be fully 

 informed on the subject. The ravages in Cuba and Central 

 America of the epidemic disease known by this name became 

 widely known, and a tendency arose and still exists to regard 

 all cases in which similar symptoms appear as affected by the 

 same disease. F. A. Stockdale in 1906 pointed out that a pro- 

 portion of the bud-rot occurring in Trinidad was purely secondary 

 in its nature, being a consequence of the failure of the palms 

 brought about by the so-caUed root disease, now known to be 

 for the most part a specific disease due to infestation with a 

 nematode worm His contention, though denied at the time, 

 has been fully confirmed by later investjgatoTS. Nematode 

 infestation has been recently found to be responsible for a large 

 amount of so-called bud-rot occurring in British Honduras, and 

 may be expected with confidence to account for a good deal 

 more elsewhere. The writer has found that typical bud-rot of 

 this kind, indistinguishable in appearance from the infectious 

 forms, follows rapidly on the death of healthy trees from poisoning 

 or the severance of the stem. The fact is that a characteristic 

 stinking rot, dominated by bacterial putrefaction, forms the 

 natural process of decay of the large amount of tender tissues 

 deeply enclosed by the successive sheathing bases of the leaves. 

 A similar process can take place within the closely wrapped shoots 

 of other monocotyledons, as for example in the top-rot of sugar- 

 cane. Evidence of infectiousness is necessary to establish 

 the existence in any given situation of a specific bud-rot disease. 



It is now becoming apparent that the true infectious bud-rot 

 existing in the West Indies is of more than one kind. Until 

 recently the opinion was generally held that the disease occurring 

 in the Western Tropics is bacterial in its nature, while that of the 

 East is fungoid. E. J. Butler and his co-workers have shown 

 that the bud-rot of Palmyra palms in India is caused by Phy- 

 tophthora palmivora and that this fungus can attack coconut, 

 and S. F. Ashby in Jamaica has found the same fungus causing 

 a bud-rot of coconut palms in Jamaica. A. Reinking in the 

 Philippines has produced a bud-rot which he regards as identical 

 with the form occurring naturally in those islands by artificial 

 infection with a Phytophthora obtained from cacao pods and 

 believed by him to be P. Faberi, which is the common pod-rot 

 fungus of the West Indies. 



After the removal of these fungoid forms it is believed that 

 there may remain a large residue of bud-rot of bacterial origin, 

 and it has yet to be shown that the epidemic bud-rot of the 

 West Indies, in which bacteria alone have been detected, is not 

 in fact of that nature. A description of this form, as at present 

 regarded, is therefore retained. The question of causation does 

 not much affect the description of the course of the disease, and 



