FILE: A Mediterranean fruit fly.
arlindo71/Getty ImagesIf you live in Los Angeles and look up, there’s a chance you might see them: small twin-engine airplanes circling over the city, unleashing hundreds of thousands of insects marked with a unique purple dye. And though it might sound unusual, it will likely become a common sight.
Earlier this month, the California Department of Food and Agriculture quarantined 69 square miles of Los Angeles County after it detected two wild Mediterranean fruit flies at someone’s home in Leimert Park, a neighborhood in South LA. The quarantine boundary encompasses Hyde Park along with parts of Culver City and Inglewood, maps show, and is just one of many that have been enforced in California over the past year as the state continues to wage war on invasive species.
Approximately 69 square miles of Los Angeles County have been placed under quarantine after officials detected wild Mediterranean fruit flies at someone's property.
California Department of Food and AgricultureResidents who live within the boundary are urged to keep homegrown fruits and vegetables on their property and double-bag fruit before throwing it in the trash, the agency wrote, while CDFA employees plan to spray nearby houses with spinosad, a natural pesticide made from soil bacterium.
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Though the invasive Medfly is just a fourth of an inch long, it’s capable of destroying 300 fruits, nuts and vegetables, posing an existential threat to California’s multibillion-dollar agriculture industry. It’s not the adult flies that cause the most damage, though — it’s their young. When a female fly lays eggs inside a fruit, they hatch into maggots and tunnel through it, turning the fruit into a rotten mass. If populations spiral out of control, it could cost the state up to $1.8 billion per year, the CDFA wrote.
Now, local officials are gearing up for the next stage of battle. Only this time, it will take place in the air.
Jay Van Rein, a spokesperson for the CDFA, told SFGATE that the agency plans to unleash 250,000 sterile male fruit flies per square mile in a 9-square-mile region near the infestation site every week — and it could take six months, if not longer, to fully eradicate the current population.
Ken Pellman, a press representative for the Los Angeles County Agriculture Department, said that the bugs, which are marked with a special purple dye, are first harvested at a military base in Los Alamitos and then loaded onto an airplane. Then, once the plane reaches liftoff, “they're just released out of the bottom of the cabin,” he told SFGATE over the phone.
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“It's quite an interesting operation down there,” he added.
Though it sounds alarming, this method has been used to eradicate invasive insects for decades and has previously helped thwart other pests like the Mexican fruit fly and pink bollworm moth. According to Van Rein, this Preventative Release Program, or PRP, is essentially a form of biological birth control that’s been in use since 1996. “Matings between these sterile males and any wild female flies result in the production of infertile eggs,” he explained. Before it was implemented, California battled Medfly infestations almost eight times a year, resorting to expensive and controversial methods like aerially releasing pesticides. Infestations have dropped about 90% since then, Van Rein wrote.
Though it’s unclear how the flies arrived in Southern California, Pellman suspects that they were brought in via uninspected produce — the usual culprit behind these increasingly common scenarios.
“We don't want it becoming established and growing and spreading to commercial agriculture areas,” Pellman said of the Medfly. “Then it becomes a big problem.”
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California residents who believe they have infested produce can call the state’s Pest Hotline at 800-491-1899 or email reportapest@cdfa.ca.gov.
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