Oriental Undesirables

Along with its hula dancers and splendid climate, Hawaii has its troubles. One of the worst is bugs. Latest undesirable to make good in the Islands is the Oriental fruit fly, an insect slightly smaller than a house fly and conspicuously marked by yellow stripes round its abdomen. It arrived during wartime, probably hitchhiking by aircraft or ship from Saipan, and spread like winged wildfire throughout the Islands, riddling all sorts of fruit and vegetables.

Far worse than the damage the flies have already done in Hawaii is the imminent possibility that they may spread to California, one of the world's best insect cafeterias. To keep them from spreading, the U.S. and the State of California have declared full-scale entomological warfare against the flies.

There is no hope of exterminating them in Hawaii; the flies are too firmly dug in. But the entomologists hope to reduce the fly population and thus reduce likelihood of an invasion of the U.S. mainland. One line of attack is to look for the flies' insect enemies. A Malayan wasp is the best fighter found so far, but it has not yet proved effective in Hawaii.

Another line of attack is lures. Scientists led by Dr. Walter Carter of the Pineapple Research Bureau have discovered that a chemical, methyl eugenol, has a fatal attraction for male flies. The experts do not know whether the males mistake the scent for females, or whether they think the stuff is good to eat, but in one week, 250,000 males swarmed into traps that had been baited with it.

But trapping the males does little good. Each female, after one encounter with an untrapped male, lays up to 300 eggs under the skins of fruit. The entomologists have not yet found a lure to attract females, which seem to take keen interest in nothing but ripe fruit.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.