New Medfly Find May Revive Spraying

With a foreboding sense of deja vu , state agriculture officials reported Thursday that they had trapped another Mediterranean fruit fly near Dodger Stadium, within blocks of where the first fly was found last July.

The unmated female fly, discovered during weekly trap inspections on Wednesday, was even found in the same variety of tree as the first: a peach. It was just outside of a sector that has been treated with the pesticide malathion.

The 1989 find prompted nearly a year of aerial pesticide spraying over large swaths of Southern California. Although a final decision will not be announced until Monday, experts said the new find leaves few options besides more spraying.

“You have to consider the whole picture,” said Roy Cunningham, a member of a five-member scientific panel that advises the state on Medfly eradication. “If this were one fly and there were no other flies around it, then you could wait awhile. But that’s not the case.”

Even the possibility of more spraying set off alarms in the environmental community, which opposes use of malathion over residences.

“They’ll never get rid of the Medfly, it’s obvious,” said Adelaide Nimitz, president of FOCUS, Families Opposed to Chemical Urban Spraying. “It’s like saying you’ll get rid of ants.”

Nimitz and other malathion protesters have suggested the state should accept the Medfly as part of nature and work toward control--by setting traps, stripping fruit from trees and releasing sterile Medflies--instead of eradication.

State officials maintain such attempts at co-existence with the Medfly would jeopardize California’s important agriculture industry.

Announcement of the discovery on Carroll Avenue, just southwest of the stadium, marked a setback in county and state plans to avoid additional pesticide spraying. Spraying over Los Angeles County wound down earlier this month, and regionally a final treatment was scheduled for July 5 in San Bernardino County.

Previously, the last report of a live Medfly had come May 1 in Downey, and officials were hopeful they could switch largely to a tactic of fighting infestations with sterile fruit flies, which are released in large amounts to breed their fertile counterparts out of existence.

But the fly’s appearance near Elysian Park was not completely unexpected and may even have been triggered by the heat, which speeds up the fly’s life cycle.

“Traditionally, the next three weeks would have been critical anyway,” said Larry Cooper, spokesman for the state’s Cooperative Medfly Project. “With the hotter weather, we expected to have more finds.”

Cooper said state agriculture officials would consult with the scientific advisers before deciding on a course of action. However, Cooper acknowledged that, with a shortage of sterile Medflies, there might be no other options.

“We’ll obviously intensify trapping and if they find another fly, it could trigger more treatment,” Cooper said.

Cunningham, a research entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said he would not even recommend waiting for a second fly to be found. He said he expects several more flies will be found before summer’s end and he blamed the Wednesday trapping on an inadequate spraying program.

“We just didn’t set our net wide enough, I guess,” he said.

The panel of scientists always has leaned toward spraying. In early May, it criticized a state plan to phase out spraying by early May as risky and premature.

At that time, state officials believed they would be able to obtain enough sterile Medflies to eliminate the remaining pockets of infestation. Problems have developed, however, at the facilities that produce the sterile flies.