Swat Team Slays Medfly

Tracking down a tiny fruit fly in the nearly 950 square miles of Orange County seems a lot like finding a needle in a haystack.

But every morning two dozen women and men set out from a storefront in Placentia with just that mission: to catch flies, particularly the destructive ones.

In the last several months, Orange County workers from the California Department of Food and Agriculture have trapped 10 wild Mediterranean fruit flies, which are a threat to more than 250 varieties of fruits, nuts and vegetables.

The fly patrol is becoming well known in South County, where the state has placed 100 traps per square mile after medflies were found near Lake Forest and Mission Viejo.

Neighborhood children greet agricultural aide Yenny Megloza with shouts: “It’s the bug lady!” and “There’s the fly girl!”

Megloza works four days a week, 10 hours a day checking traps for wild medflies--as opposed to sterile flies that the state has released by the millions in an attempt to breed the wild flies out of existence.

In her two years on the job, Megloza has yet to find a nonsterile fly in her traps--which is fine with her. That means the vigilance of her team is helping to keep the constant threat of a medfly infestation under control.

Megloza and her colleagues never want to get a call from state laboratories confirming that a nonsterile fly has been found. “It means a lot more work for us,” she says, “a lot more traps, a lot more checking and worrying.”

The discoveries this year meant setting out hundreds more traps in the immediate area of the finds. Where there had been 10 traps per square mile before, there are now 100. The state also began dropping 5.5 million sterile medflies a week over South County. Constant attention is essential because if the flies lay their eggs in ripening fruits or vegetables, the crop is ruined.

To monitor the effectiveness of that campaign, Megloza makes her daily rounds in a truck stocked with buckets of water, test tubes, fly paper and glass bottles to trap insects. She carries no net or oversized magnifying glass, and she wears no protective gear--just jeans and an Agriculture Department T-shirt.

Megloza, 21, says she didn’t know one fly from another before she started the job. Now she’s an expert, not only on insects but on fruit trees. She cruises through the neighborhoods on her route looking for “trapper’s glory” sites: yards with plenty of fruit trees where she can place the traps, which must be relocated every six weeks.

“I’m always looking for ways to make my route better,” says Megloza, who also takes her work home with her--she offered to put fly traps in the fruit trees at her home in Anaheim.

Most sites have four traps. Three are dry, each with a different chemical bait. The fourth is wet, containing a yeast solution in a laboratory beaker open at the bottom to let the flies in. Baits vary because the medfly, with its distinctively striped wings, is not the only quarry. Megloza also hunts for its equally destructive relatives: the Oriental fruit fly, Mexican fruit fly and melon fly.

At each stop on her route, Megloza consults her notes for the location of the traps she left the previous week. With a hook on the end of a broom-like stick, she removes the traps from trees and replaces them with fresh ones, stretching her average height to its limit to elude the reach of mischievous children.

“I have to keep this one away from Dennis the Menace,” she says at a stop on Lemon Tree Drive in La Habra, the neighborhood where one boy had rigged his mother’s broom to steal the fly traps.

After she hangs the new traps, Megloza examines the contents of the old ones. She strains the yeasty water--which has a strong fetid odor--from the glass jar with a plastic colander, then uses long tweezers to pick out any medflies. Though all specimens likely will be sterile, any she finds go into test tubes to be sent to state laboratories for analysis. Any flies caught in the dry traps go into bags and off to the labs as well.

The job is never glamorous and sometimes unpleasant. “You get used to it,” Megloza says with a smile as she scoops up dead flies. “You always wash your hands before lunch.”

Without such action, state agricultural officials say, California produce could be banned in foreign ports and prohibited from crossing state lines--potentially devastating to the state’s $26.8-billion-a-year agricultural industry. In Orange County, agriculture brings $267 million a year to the economy.

Rick Le Feuvre, Orange County agricultural commissioner, said the work of Megloza and her 300 colleagues across the state is “our early warning system, and it’s the best early warning system we could have for the money.”