Oriental Fruit Fly in Ventura Raises Quarantine Concern : Agriculture: Officials have set more traps but they are hoping that no more pests are found. An infestation would trigger restrictions that could threaten sales of up to $280 million.

A single Oriental fruit fly has been found for the first time in Ventura County’s west end, raising concerns about a financially devastating fruit quarantine if additional flies are found.

The county agricultural commissioner’s office set 50 traps this week in addition to 920 traps already set countywide in an attempt to attract the notorious pest. It destroys citrus, avocados, strawberries, tomatoes and more than 200 other fruits.

Officials figure that the county is out of the woods if no flies are found in traps by tonight, nearly a week since the first one was captured Friday. But if another two or three are trapped, growers will know that there is the potential for a breeding population nearby.

“It only matters when they make more than one find,” Farm Bureau President Randy Axell said. “That’s when it gets serious.”

An infestation in the county’s fruit crops would be serious, Agricultural Commissioner Earl McPhail said. It would trigger an 81-square-mile quarantine from Ojai to Saticoy that would limit out-of-state shipments and prohibit exports abroad, threatening sales of up to $280 million, McPhail said.

If an infestation were discovered, the commissioner’s office will likely spray a combination of pesticide and bait on telephone poles to kill the bugs. Officials will not use aerial spraying against the Oriental fruit fly, McPhail said.

McPhail’s employees discovered the adult fly Friday in a trap near Ventura Avenue and Vince Street, about a mile north of Main Street. The fly likely arrived with fruit brought illegally into the state or carried on a shipped package, said David Beuttner, chief deputy agricultural commissioner.

The fly sometimes infests pineapples and other tropical fruit grown in Hawaii, officials said.

A single fly was found in Camarillo in 1985 and in the area between Fillmore and Moorpark in 1983. Flies have also been found in the Thousand Oaks area, but never before in Ventura.

“If one were found now in Thousand Oaks, we would be concerned, “ Axell said. “But the lines they would draw for a quarantine area would probably not go over the hill.”

The adult Oriental fruit fly is slightly larger than a house fly and has a yellow striped abdomen and yellowish legs. Its maggots are white. The female, which can lay up to 1,500 eggs in a lifetime, deposits 10 to 100 eggs at a time under the skin of the fruit. When the maggots hatch, “they tunnel through the pulp, turning it into a rotten mass,” the California Department of Food and Agriculture wrote in a pamphlet produced for growers.

Home fruit growers as well as professionals are asked to report any maggot-infested fruit to the agricultural commissioner’s office at (805) 647-5931. Officials caution that fruit does not always look damaged from the outside, but may become brown and mottled as the maggots feed.