Phal in need of help

[chemist]

Hello everyone,
I have few phals which started to show some kind of leave damage and I'm not sure what cause it.
Here are pictures of most affected one. It started with new leaf, you probably can see some kind of bumps on surface with little dot in the middle of the bump. Sometime after that leaves started to develop yellowish areas.

Sometime before it I noticed that phals with new spikes started to develop buds and there was some syrup on spikes around buds. Well I thought it was good sign - phals are doing great. I guess it was not. Some of buds dried up... Due to what i don't know, I did not noticed any pests except fungus gnats (few at that time) . Also my watering schedule changed, I've got busy with other project and probably did not water enough plus it got much drier (RH only about 30%).

Few days ago I think I spot few thrips , i never saw it before in my life so i only compared it to pics online and came to this conclusion.

What can i do to help my phals in this situation?

Thank you in advance!

[ksriramkumar]

white marks looks like a mite infestation. bumps on the leaves surface could be due to watering late in the day and the environment is cold then it could cause some kind of edema in the leaf tissue. I could be wrong

[kspalding]

It looks to me like swelling from excess watering where the roots absorbs water faster than the leaves provide it to the plant. It is a common thing when weather gets cooler but the caretaker forgets to lessen its water schedule to accomodate the plants lessened need for it.

---------- Post Merged at 10:44 AM ----------

If the problem is thrip take the next bud just starting to open and force the bud open just a little where u can see the center. Blow into it. U will see some yellow larvae and very small black crawling bugs stir up. But thrips dont usually affect the leaves they feed from the necter of the blooms. If they are tiny flying insects it could be fungus gnats attracted to the excess watering as well.

---------- Post Merged at 10:53 AM ----------

Thrips tend to be drawn to the (i think its called) anther cap where those two tiny yellow dots are that are used in pollination where the juices r sweeter.

[chemist]

thank you for your replies!
I think you are both right: I did water later in the day, almost at night few times.
Its hard to adjust from summer water regime to winter - with heat is being on and just a yard down from the shelf with plant roots and medium look dried up in few days. so I was watering 2 times a week.
I agree thrips probably did not cause the leave damage, especially on this particular plant there was no buds, only old spike. So yesterday I decided to unpot this phal even though roots looked ok. good thing I did. probably while watering there was too much water at the base so looks like it started to root, not the roots but lower leave. it appeared to me stem got rot in a middle of it. So I removed two lower leaves and cut as much of stem as could leaving some healthy roots and soak it in physan 20.

Time will show if it will survive or not.

[kspalding]