Elsinoe necatrix and E. masingae cause indistinguishable disease symptoms.

Young leaf and shoot tissues are most severely affected. Small necrotic spots that are up to 1 mm in diameter appear on infected tissues, which are circular or irregular, brown to black in colour and sometimes surrounded by a chlorotic (yellow) halo. As infection develops, the spots become reddish brown to black at their centres with slightly raised, diffuse, tan to grey, scab-like margins. Spots can be scattered or concentrated where rainwater accumulates on the leaf surface. This eventually leads to deformation of the leaves, causing curvature usually on one of the leaf lobes. The scab-like spots commonly dry and drop from the unaffected tissue causing a shot-hole appearance (Pham et al. 2021).

On severely affected trees, lesions can coalesce, leading to girdled, crinkled and distorted shoots and leaves. Once the leaves are infected, the damage to the tissues is permanent, and the infected tissues do not recover. On more susceptible clones, secondary symptoms include a “feathering” effect, resulting in loss of apical dominance; abnormal elongated branches with short internodes, and the production of epicormic shoots. Severely affected clones usually die after a number of successive infection cycles (Pham et al. 2021).