SUMMARY:

Because symptoms alone cannot be used to diagnose a nematode problem, it is necessary to take and have samples of soil and plant tissue that might be infested analyzed by a diagnostic laboratory. There is no one correct way to sample for nematodes. Important points to keep in mind are:

1. that nematodes are aquatic organisms and may not be active in dry soils,
2. that plant parasitic nematodes feed on plants, so that in soil they should be most abundant at the rooting depth of the current or previous crop,
3. that nematodes frequently have a patchy or nonrandom distribution, so that detection becomes more likely with an increase in the number of subsamples, and
4. nematode population levels will typically fluctuate during the year.

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