New Bug Lab Aims to Hatch a Swarm of Scientific Discoveries

As if closing the doors on a tomb full of scarabs, UC Riverside began sealing off a new high-tech bug lab Friday, the only such facility in California and a key weapon in a campaign to protect Western crops from pests and the world from disease-carrying insects.

After offering the public a final glimpse of the $15-million, 28,000-square-foot insectary and quarantine, university officials will carefully shield it from the outside world--not for the sake of secrecy, but security.

Once they begin working in about a month, researchers in the lab will superheat equipment and fumigate it with nitrogen to ensure the destruction of any wayward insects or pollen. They will shower and change clothes before moving from one insect room to another. Only authorized scientists will be allowed inside.

As entomology professor Peter Atkinson joked: “We don’t want any students wandering in to ask where the library is.”

At first blush, the level of caution over a building full of bugs seems a little neurotic. Instead, scientists say, it is a sober reflection of California’s vulnerability to agricultural pests--and of the stubborn resilience of insects that spread pathogens.

“We have to make sure that, on a day-to-day basis, the things that are brought in there stay in there,” said Timothy D. Paine, chairman of the university’s department of entomology. “And we have to take, in some cases, extraordinary measures to make sure they don’t get out.”

On a tour of the facility Friday afternoon, walking past wet-paint signs, Paine pointed out some of the security precautions.

The air pressure, for instance, is higher in the halls than in the rearing rooms where work will be done with insects. That creates a constant and somewhat bizarre breeze in some portions of the building--a breeze designed to keep curious bugs from finding the outside world.

The building, Paine said, is intentionally complex and maze-like to further prevent incompatible bugs from winding up in the same place. Doors to the outside are magnetically sealed and interlocking.

“There are a lot of safeguards built in,” Paine said. “Some of them are pretty subtle--but they are very effective.”

California’s intimacy with the Pacific Rim, its border with Mexico, its tourism business, its status as a haven for farmers who dabble in scores of exotic crops--all of it has long exposed the state to dangerous bugs that have periodically devastated crops.

New environmental regulations, although bringing ecological and health benefits, have cut into the use of some pesticides, raising concerns among some farmers. More maddening is that many insects--such as red scales, which nearly extinguished California’s citrus industry at the turn of the 20th century--have become increasingly resistant to pesticides that are still in use.

A new exotic pest is introduced to the state every 60 days, scientists say, and such creatures cause $3 billion in damage to crops and farms each year.

“We’ve got to find new approaches,” Atkinson said.

UC Riverside has already developed a reputation as a national leader in using natural enemies to fight agricultural pests.

Scientists here were instrumental, for example, in bringing a parasitic wasp to California from France that was used with marked success to fight the infamous ash whitefly, which defoliated thousands of Southern California trees in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The insectary will allow the university to fight agricultural pests with new gusto, scientists say.

UC Riverside is launching, for example, a battle against the avocado thrip, which was first found in 1996 in Ventura County and now infests about 80% of the state’s crop--no small dilemma, because California produces 95% of the nation’s avocados. Scientists are scouring Mexico and Guatemala to find a natural enemy, similar to the parasitic wasp, that could be introduced to the environment in an effort to save avocados.

The new facility, which took two years to build and was paid for with a combination of federal and state money, plus private donations, will tweak that work in subtle but important ways, Paine said.

In one case, researchers at UC Riverside have been conducting tests on a moth that has begun feasting on pecans and other nut crops across the nation. Scientists have been using the moth’s chemical sex attractants to develop better methods of trapping and studying it, in an attempt to stave off what some fear is an imminent invasion of California.

But because that moth hasn’t surfaced in the state, federal regulations don’t allow UC Riverside to import specimens for research. So scientists were removing the moth’s glands in Texas, then flying them to Riverside for research.

Only Facility of Its Kind in State

UC Riverside’s insectary, however, contains a so-called Level 3 quarantine, the only facility of its kind in California and one of only a few in the nation. Scientists may now begin experimenting more freely--and more effectively--on the moth inside the new facility, Paine said.

The work done in the insectary won’t just target agricultural pests. Some of it will be aimed at diseases that are carried across the world, with increasing speed, by bugs.

In the new facility, Atkinson plans to tinker with the genes of mosquitoes in an attempt to reduce their ability to transmit pathogens to humans.

Like some agricultural pests, mosquitoes are growing immune to many insecticides that are used to cap their population around the world, Atkinson said. That has allowed for a recent comeback of diseases that were widely considered old-school--malaria, for example, and the dengue virus, for which there is no vaccine.

Atkinson seeks to identify the genes that are required to move pathogens from the gut of a mosquito to its salivary glands. He hopes the work will lead to new, environmentally sound insecticides that specifically target that genetic mechanism. Eventually, he hopes to produce mosquitoes that are unable to transmit diseases.

“A lot of these diseases are reemerging around the world,” Atkinson said. “This work is very important both for this hemisphere and for the world.”