A Simple Case of Insecticide

The San Bernardino County town of Colton is the only city in the nation with an official, federally designated fly preserve. Hard as it may be to believe, this is not a distinction sought by city leaders, who can’t imagine that the 10-acre, chain-link-ringed habitat of the tiny Delhi Sands flower-loving fly will ever challenge Mt. Slover, a 300-foot limestone peak owned by a cement company, as the city’s major landmark.

Not that the fly lacks star power--it’s the only fly that lives under the protection of the United States government. Federal wildlife officials came to its rescue in 1993, listing the fly as an endangered species amid concerns that Colton’s attempts at development were threatening it with extinction. Endemic to the Colton Dunes, a system of weed-covered inland sand dunes that once sprawled over 40 square miles, the fly had lost all but 2% of its habitat to human encroachment. So, along with its protected status and its own preserve, the fly’s got the sympathy thing going.

But while other Inland Empire cities have cashed in on the region’s growth, this city of about 47,000 people has languished, its efforts to attract development repeatedly foiled by its rare ecological treasure. Colton officials claim federal protection of the fly has inflicted a huge toll on the city’s economy and quality of life--as much as $300 million of investment and between 700 and 1,000 jobs. That explains the unusual decoration on the wall of the Colton city manager’s office.

It is, unmistakably, an oversized red fly swatter.

The staging area of what may be the country’s oddest environmental battle sits hard along Interstate 10. While you can’t get into the fly preserve itself, there’s some habitat just outside the fence, squeezed between the flies and the freeway. To the casual observer, it’s no more than a patch of dirt, topped with ragged clumps of sagebrush. But to the scientists who are conducting this tour--Greg Ballmer, of UC Riverside, and Ken Osborne, a Riverside entomologist who works with developers--it is a vital ecosystem. “There’s a lot of unique things that live here,” Ballmer says. “We’re looking at it as a treasure trove of biological information.”

There clearly are dissenting opinions on this, but to a couple of guys who trace their passion for bugs to early childhood, the preserve is as exciting as a candy store. Ballmer and Osborne pause regularly to identify species. “Here you see a scavenger beetle feeding on a trash heap left behind by harvester ants,” enthuses the wiry, bushy-mustached Osborne as he kneels on the sand. A few minutes later, his eagle eye spots a tiny parasitic fly (no relation to the Delhi Sands flower-loving variety) that, he predicts, “is going to hover over the burrow of another insect species and lay its egg.” In that sense, he says, the parasite will be an “alien” invader.

The two biologists know just about everything there is to know about the Delhi Sands fly. They can tell you that it grows to about an inch in length, spends most of its existence as a maggot underground, and enjoys only a few days of adulthood before expiring in the summer heat. With its honey-brown coloring, you--and its fellow insects--might easily mistake it for the common wasp. But there is nothing common about the tubular-mouthed Rhaphiomidas terminatus abdominalis. Females lay their eggs in the sand to a depth of two to three inches. The newly hatched larvae wiggle up to the surface, where ants mistake them for ant larvae and take them back underground to their nest. Ants, Ballmer says, apparently are a little dim.

“You can fool ants,” he notes.

No one knows what exactly happens in the ant nest. Experts theorize that its gullible denizens tend the fly larvae as if part of their own brood and the larvae behave like freeloading guests, feasting on the ants’ food. Once a larva is fully developed, which takes at least a year, it pops out of the soil as a pupa from which the adult fly will emerge. During its brief adulthood, the fly devotes much of its energy to breeding. The female perches coquettishly on a plant and awaits her suitors. The courtship is as brief as a flirtation on “The Bachelor.” “The male jumps on her and goes after it,” Osborne says.

Even though the fly does not appear to be a pollinator--or what it pollinates doesn’t exist anymore--scientists worry that it could still play an important role in the dunes’ ecosystem. Perhaps the larva’s consumption of ant food helps keep the ant population from becoming too well-fed, and therefore dominant. The experts say the whole point of the endangered species listing is to preserve that ecosystem. “There is an [invertebrate] community that numbers in the hundreds of species,” says Osborne. “The fly . . . acts as an umbrella species, giving this protection to the whole community.”

Jane Hendron, spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office in Carlsbad, expresses a similar notion. You can look at an ecosystem as a piece of fabric, she suggests. If you let a species go extinct, she says, “you’re pulling a thread out of that fabric. How many threads can you pull out and still maintain the integrity of the overall fabric?”

That question doesn’t necessarily keep Colton officials up at night. They’re more concerned about an ecosystem of 47,000 mostly Latino residents who want nice places to shop and decent places to play, and about driving away developers who don’t want to negotiate conservation plans with the federal wildlife agency, which could involve forking out major dollars to acquire suitable replacement fly habitat. (One entrepreneur who stayed the bureaucratic course endured what he recently called a “10-year nightmare” before he finally began construction on a residential project.)

Colton isn’t the only disgruntled fly host in the Inland Empire. Frustration is building in such cities as Fontana and Rialto, too. In south Fontana, Delhi Sands flies were found last summer on vacant portions of the 440-acre city-owned Empire Center, threatening the completion of the giant residential, industrial and commercial project. “The development has a huge cloud over it,” one city official complained. “The land is being held hostage.”

But Colton is Fly Central. The Colton Dunes, which consist of a soil called Delhi (pronounced Del-high) Sands, once covered a wide area of northwestern Riverside and southwestern San Bernardino counties. Most of what’s left of the habitat is in Colton. And so far, only Colton has given up on dealing with the Carlsbad office of U.S. Fish and Wildlife, which handles all fly-related issues in the Inland Empire. “We have washed our hands of the Carlsbad office,” City Manager Daryl Parrish says. “We’ve done the dance with them enough times to know it will bear no fruit.”

The final straw was the demise last summer of a sports park that the city was hoping to develop just north of Interstate 10. The $10-million project would have provided much-needed recreational facilities and spurred the related development of a hotel and restaurant. But after a biologist sighted Delhi Sands flies on the property, the city and Fish and Wildlife were unable to come up with a conservation package.

Last September, an irate Mayor Deirdre Bennett called a news conference and announced that Colton would no longer work on a regional habitat conservation plan, would seek legislation to remove the fly from the endangered species list, and would look into suing Fish and Wildlife.

“Enough is enough,” the mayor proclaimed in her declaration of war. “To us and the majority of Americans with any common sense at all, they are pests, nothing more, nothing less, pests we have historically grown up swatting.”

Bennett saved her most stinging rhetoric for last: “And remember, people matter more than bugs.”

The fly’s history in Colton goes back long before european settlement. An adult male was collected there in 1888, a year after the city was incorporated. The Rhaphiomidas genus, which was first classified in 1941, includes 17 species, all of which share a fondness for flower nectar. The closest relative of the Delhi Sands fly, found only in the El Segundo Dunes, now is almost extinct thanks to urban development.

At his home in Van Nuys, insect enthusiast and entomology consultant Rick Rogers keeps a display case filled with his extensive collection of preserved Delhi Sands flies. The females, he points out, have an attachment at the end of their tails, to better cling onto males while mating. The flies’ wasp-like coloring, he suggests, is a clever disguise designed to confuse wasp-shy predators.

Rogers is one of a handful of experts licensed to conduct surveys for Delhi Sands flies. This means spending hours in the midday sun at the height of summer, keeping vigil on dusty vacant lots for the elusive insect. (“It’s hell,” groans Osborne, the Riverside entomologist.) While to the untrained eye one fly looks identical to another, the experts say they can actually tell them apart by individual markings.

Rogers first started finding flies in the Colton Dunes during the mid-1980s. “There were hundreds and hundreds of them,” he recalls. But he soon noticed their habitat was shrinking at an alarming rate. “Year after year, I was seeing more and more disappear.”

The habitat was under attack by humans, who were mining the surface for sand, converting agricultural land, building residential and commercial projects, dumping cow manure from local dairies, and scarring the land with off-road vehicles, among other intrusions. Rogers was alarmed enough to alert Ballmer, the fellow fly-spotter from UC Riverside, who, in 1990, filed a petition seeking endangered status for the fly.

It was an audacious move. No fly had made it onto the protection list since Congress passed the Endangered Species Act in 1973. Compared to a bald eagle, a bighorn sheep or even a desert tortoise, the Delhi Sands fly has little obvious appeal. Concedes Fish and Wildlife’s Hendron: “It’s not a charismatic species. Most people don’t consider it to be cute and cuddly. It is an insect.” But cuddliness and coolness are not among the criteria for declaring a species endangered. And after a lengthy review, the fly’s apparent salvation arrived in the form of a rule published Sept. 9, 1993:

“This species is in imminent danger of extinction due to extensive habitat loss and degradation that has reduced its range by over 97 percent,” federal wildlife officials concluded. “This rule implements Federal protection provided by the [Endangered Species] Act for the Delhi Sands flower-loving fly.”

Although the agency held a public hearing in San Bernardino in early 1993, officials in Colton weren’t paying too much attention to the fly issue. Assistant City Manager Al Holliman speculates that “probably nobody ever thought it would be what it is.”

A cynic might suggest that officials had other things on their minds in a town that has become almost synonymous with political turmoil. Given Colton’s reputation as what one observer of local politics called “the recall capital of the world,” even lasting a full term as a council member is considered an achievement. Two former councilmen and two of Mayor Bennett’s predecessors recently were convicted of taking bribes in exchange for favorable votes on projects before the city.

It’s easy to understand the frustration of city officials, who no doubt feel like a motorist with a flat tire watching traffic speed past. Nearby cities sport attractions such as the mammoth Ontario Mills mall and the famed Fontana Speedway. Colton, by contrast, has the fly preserve and Mt. Slover. One in five Colton families lives below the poverty line and unemployment is running at more than 5%, above the rate for both San Bernardino and Riverside counties. A national men’s lifestyle magazine, Razor, recently described the city as a “dusty, blue-collar redoubt . . . pocked by strip malls, tract homes, topless clubs and, of course, churches.”

The current crop of City Hall officials is led by Bennett, a peppy, petite special-education teacher who says the city is now committed to honest government and to catching up with its fast-growing neighbors. But much of the remaining developable land is on the blight-ridden west side of town bordering Rialto. And there, alas, resides the Delhi Sands fly.

“Our job is to meet the needs of our constituents and enhance their quality of life,” Holliman says. “The fly has directly prohibited us from doing our job and meeting those needs.”

To prove the point, Holliman, Parrish, Bennett and Michelle Ouellette, an attorney for Colton, lead their own tour of fly hot spots. Traveling in Parrish’s city car, they exit Interstate 10 just west of Arrowhead Regional Medical Center. The entire interchange is gridlocked. “We’re experiencing fly impacts right now,” grumbles Holliman from the back seat.

According to Ouellette, San Bernardino County is hoping to improve the interchange. But because of the nearby fly habitat, Fish and Wildlife has demanded that the county purchase 22 acres of replacement land. “That takes years to negotiate and millions of dollars to acquire,” she says.

In the meantime, imagine “we were an emergency vehicle with someone who was dying,” says Bennett. “Imagine how difficult it would be to get them” to the hospital.

Just south of the interchange, near Mt. Slover, garbage is strewn along both sides of a quarter-mile stretch of a two-lane road that parallels the freeway. Those too lazy to go to a landfill have dumped everything from living-room sofas and TV sets to clothing and boxes of garden clippings. The Colton officials would like to clean up the eyesore. The problem? Fish and Wildlife says the skip loaders that the city would use might disturb the sand, and thus the flies.

Civic outrage over the trash clash has poured into letters to the editor. “How long are ‘we the people’ going to put up with enviro-Nazi wackos?” a Colton resident wrote the Riverside Press-Enterprise. The mayor echoes the sentiment with a grimace: “It makes me sick because that’s not a very good image for us to be presenting.”

The county hospital on the other side of the freeway was supposed to stimulate economic development, and the city zoned the surrounding land for medical offices, pharmacies and other related businesses. But today, Arrowhead Regional Medical Center is marooned in a sea of empty lots. Just to the south is the fly preserve, which the county set aside as part of the deal to develop the hospital. A Georgia company that proposed building a paper-recycling plant near the area gave up after two years of delays, taking hundreds of potential jobs with it. The few local businesses include a piano store, a trucking company, a golf driving range, and a shopping center whose developer spent 10 years in negotiations with Fish and Wildlife before he broke ground. “It pretty much destroyed my financial and personal life,” says John Reichel of Sunwest Enterprises in Newport Beach.

To get a permit from Fish and Wildlife, developers must conduct surveys of their land during two separate summers. If flies show up, they have to develop a conservation plan. Reichel chose to bypass a survey and eventually agreed to a plan that required him to set aside 11 acres for flies.

In Colton, they’re convinced that the wildlife agency in Carlsbad is using the fly to further an environmentalist agenda. “It’s really not about a specific species,” Holliman says. “It’s to have more open space and stop development.” Bennett has called the permit process “legalized extortion.”

The city’s fly tour ends at the once-promising but now barren sports park site. Things looked good for the project when the first survey was flyless. But the second time around, Osborne spotted the insects in all four quadrants of the property. “Beyond that, I won’t say any more because it is still politically sensitive,” the spotter says. “That discovery was certainly a big disappointment to the City of Colton.”

Rather than pay what could be more than $3 million to acquire substitute land for the fly, the city has opted for an inferior but fly-free location. “This has deprived [residents] of the best place for a sports park,” says Holliman. “When it comes down to quality of human life versus the fly, I mean,” he pauses, the indignation rising, “we find it ludicrous.”

The curious are warned away from Colton’s federally designated fly preserve with a sign that reads “No Trespassing Under Penalty of Law.” As a result, not much goes on there, unless you count the daily travails of easily fooled ants, freeloading maggots and the feverish summertime breeding of those rare Delhi Sands flies, which may or may not serve a useful purpose in their ecosystem.

Hendron, the Carlsbad official, insists her agency is sensitive to Colton’s predicament. “We are mandated to apply the Endangered Species Act . . . in a way that is fair and balanced,” she says. “Our job is to honestly and forthrightly and reasonably balance conservation of the species with all of the other interests.” The act, she notes, declares that all America’s creatures have value.

The federal protection of the Delhi Sands fly is designed to ensure its survival. According to the official species recovery plan published in 1997, the insect will be removed from the endangered list when the population reaches a sustainable level, preferably in about 20 years. “We all want to get to that day,” Hendron says.

Some scientists fear that the fly’s habitat already is so depleted and fragmented that the species will die out anyway. It’s all very well having the odd 10-acre preserve, but the fly won’t survive unless it has opportunities to mate with other fly populations and maintain genetic diversity. “We’re worried about that,” Rogers says. “You can’t be too optimistic about long-term survival.”

At Colton City Hall, however, they’re not sitting around waiting for the fly to go extinct. Officials have asked Democratic Rep. Joe Baca of San Bernardino to introduce a bill that would effectively turn the Endangered Species Act into the Endangered Genus Act. In other words, you could only protect the Delhi Sands fly by listing the entire Rhaphiomidas family as endangered. The passage of that bill, therefore, could end up tilting the balance significantly toward developers in many different battles with intrusive animals. “We can solve a greater issue by changing the Endangered Species Act,” Bennett says.

The city also has dropped out of talks on the regional habitat conservation plan, which involves other fly-host cities such as Fontana and Rialto. On the legal front, it is considering a suit claiming that Fish and Wildlife has disregarded the economic impacts of its fly policies on Colton’s low- and moderate-income residents. It’s an approach normally associated with minority neighborhoods affected by toxic waste dumps and other pollutants, but it’s an approach attorney Ouellette promises “would be unique and cutting edge.”

Certainly, Daryl Parrish’s fly swatter isn’t coming down off his wall any time soon. The city manager picked it up at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport while flying home from Delhi Sands fly meetings in Washington, D.C., last year. He customized a Texas Jumbo Flyswatter into a Delhi Sands Flyswatter and gave it a prominent place in city affairs. Parrish is confident the swatter will become a hot item. “I suspect,” he says, “that they will appear throughout the fly-impacted regions of the Inland Empire.”