Millions of Fruit flies will be dropped on Los Angeles | Hacker News Reader

Millions of Fruit flies will be dropped on Los Angeles

ktla.com

47 pointschfritz43 comments

Curious paragraph at the very end of the NYT’s article on this:

“ On average, it takes 28 flights per week to cover a 1,750-square-mile region, according to the state Food and Agriculture Department. To combat the Leimert Park outbreak, officials said they would divert two flights per week to target the affected neighborhoods.

Strict procedures are now in place to prevent another accidental release of fertile flies, Dr. Leathers said. “We really need to make sure there’s a lot more sterile flies out there, than the wild flies,” he said, “to make it more likely to work.””

Thats the end of the article. No mention of accidental release of fertile flies elsewhere in the article. Article burying the lede?

They're presumably referencing a major fruit fly fuckup from back in 1981. In 1981, there was an outbreak of "medfly," the mediterranean fruit fly. It was a big economic disaster for California. The reaction was crazy. People were up in arms. The state started spraying chemicals on everything. But environmentalists were like "hey, um, maybe spraying a bunch of pesticide on everything isn't great" and the governor was like "yeah, I'm gonna not aerially spray everywhere." But then the Federal government stepped in and ordered we spread it everywhere. The medfly thing was bonkers. Years later, there would be a whole insane side plot where a terrorist "medfly breeders" group would send notices to newspapers that they were secretly breeding more medflies.

Anyway, during this insane hullaballoo, one of the alternatives to spraying that they tried was releasing a bunch of "sterile" male flies that they somehow got from Peru. I have no idea what Peru reportedly did to sterilize them (maybe they had a different breed?), but whatever it was was wrong, and California ended up dumping a few hundred thousand perfectly virile male flies out.

Here's an old news story about the accidentally fertile medfly thing: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/10/us/fertile-flies-released...

And here's a video about the general medfly California crisis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQfhZ1JYUDE

then chemtrails pretty much are real after all

No, they aren't. Aerial spraying is used in agriculture, by crop-dusting planes flown at low altitude. This is how pesticides are delivered, in small and large treatments.

Contrails are real. They're a cloud formation caused by engine exhaust at high altitude.

Chemtrails are a stupid conspiracy theory wherein contrails are imagined to be chemical sprays. If spraying was done at such high altitudes in California, most of it would end up in the ocean, or perhaps the Rocky Mountains.

The conspiracy theory "works" because it conflates an unintuitive physical phenomenon with a known-bad prior government action. But in reality, it relies on deep ignorance of physics.

> contrails

usually it's the engine exhaust right

Whoops, you're right. Corrected.

aren't contrails still Bad?

from https://blog.google/technology/ai/ai-airlines-contrails-clim...

"""Contrails — the thin, white lines you sometimes see behind airplanes — have a surprisingly large impact on our climate. The 2022 IPCC report noted that clouds created by contrails account for roughly 35% of aviation's global warming impact, over half the impact of the world’s jet fuel."""

Yeah and it's called pollution, which is why some are advocating we just fly less to Cancun, Malle or anywhere else.

I was wondering that too, the closest I could find was this (but was not fruit flies and not in the USA):

https://entomology.umd.edu/news/hunting-the-flesh-eating-scr...

One unique difficulty arose in 2003 when the radiation apparatus that sterilized screwworm flies malfunctioned, resulting in the accidental release of fertile flies in Panama. Although this was a significant setback in the screwworm eradication program in Central America, Dr. Welch and others from the USDA worked tirelessly to correct this error

Please do this for the rest evasive blackberry loving fruit fly introduced around 2008.

Last batch of boysenberries I got from a farmers market were teeming with fruit fly maggots. If you want to check yours, put them in a bowl of very salty water. It makes the maggots craw out.

Before 2008ish this issue didn’t exist. Now it’s ruined berries and caused huge economic damages.

Please please don’t order plants online from Amazon or other sellers unless you’re extremely confident they’re properly licensed. Otherwise you, yes you personally, could be why a billion dollar economic loss is incurred and fruit or something is ruined for everyone.

As mentioned by others, this is preferred to having malathion sprayed from helicopters over the LA Basin in the 1980's. I remember having to wash down my parent's cars in the morning to remove it as the solution could damage painted surfaces.

  The program began in 1996, after concerns over the use of the pesticide malathion, which was used to control the invasive flies. Having been found in Hawaii in 1910, the flies had made their way to California by 1975. In response, officials dropped 2.5 million sterile male Mediterranean fruit flies in western Los Angeles County. But in 1981, the U.S.D.A. accidentally released hundreds of thousands of fertile males, posing a threat to California’s agriculture industry, and reviving support for the pesticide. For years, the department used both approaches, but ultimately ceased the use of the pesticide.

The timeline in this paragraph has me needing to whiteboard a BTTF-esque flow diagram. I've read it 5 times.

The lizard leaders are feeding their lizard constituency!

More seriously, LA in the past 12 months has seen these very large, more colorful, more aggressive mosquitoes that I've never seen in the region before. Mosquitos growing up were little black dots that you could barely see. Now they're glinting-blue hunters with white stripes and a hatred for women and children. I feel like I've only seen bugs like this in South America. Am I being a doomer or has something changed in the LA area? Edit: Answered my own question: https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/story/2023-09-21/mosquitos...

Aedes aegypti’s are lovely aren’t they. /s

they’re aggressive disease carrying mosquitoes with an expanding range and proteins that cause huge itchy welts in some people.

The invasive Aedes Mosquito is the biggest quality of life issue to ever hit Southern California.

I cannot believe more people are not trying to solve this horrible horrible problem.

I'm afraid the government will only be bothered to do something when a large outbreak of a mosquito borne disease arrives, and by then it may be too late.

Been around about five years. Maybe you have water around this year and made it worse.

Have you ever been to Alaska in the summer? The old joke is "Two mosquitos by the shore capture a human for feeding and argue whether to take him further inland. They ultimately decide not to, because then the 'big ones would get him'"

Here's a blog post [1] from 2009 with pictures from one of the pilots, though no idea if this company still has the contract. It's very interesting process overall. The other noteworthy thing about these flights (and probably the reason for the media blitz) is people get all paranoid about the flight paths and think its some kind of surveillance. To be fair, it's pretty odd for most aircraft to make long tight tracks back and forth across the city at low level.

[1] https://www.rapp.org/archives/2009/03/a-day-at-medfly/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_California_medfly_attac...

Lord of the flies. Or https://insectk.ing/ , if you will.

For those outside the US: https://archive.ph/TcqRu

I'm curious if they won't go all jurassic park and do a "life finds a way" thing. I know nothing about fruit fly biology.

The sterile male technique is used for suppressing multiple species of insects, to great success:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8304793/

Of particular note, billions of mosquitoes are created and utilized this way, and the eradication of extremely nasty flies from areas.

In order for insects to evolve past this, there has to be a difference other than sterility, and already have some way to detect it. Even if that were the case, it would still force mosquitoes into a suboptimal state, consuming their energy and resources on supporting an less efficient and more finicky method of finding a viable mate vs what they normally are optimized to do. All traits have a cost, and need a viable evolutionary path to even have it show up.

I hope we find a way to implement this technique in all the awful ticks that are expanding their range along with the diseases they carry. Hell I’m for straight up genetically engineering animals that ticks can’t survive on, if we can.

> there has to be a difference other than sterility, and already have some way to detect it.

Like, say, a purple die that only the sterile male have?

Sure. But if that happens, guess what the fix is?

The dye isn’t critical to the technique, it’s just for our convenience.

If this could be done for house flies, I’d help crowd fund it to a reasonable level.

Flies are one of the only insects that pollinate mangos, afaik.

I'm ok with this sacrifice on a personal level

You’re sentencing us to Mexican mangoes forever.

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. Or Los Angeles, apparently.

this has been going on for years... some planes involved: N67K N66W N65U

This Plane Wasn’t Snooping On Protesters In Los Angeles, It Was Dropping Irradiated Bugs

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33812/this-plane-wasnt...

A good example of this is a series of missions that one Beechcraft King Air A90, with the civil registration number N67K, flew over the greater Los Angeles area between May 28 and June 1, 2020.

The company (Dynamic Aviation) that owns these planes is mainly in the business of renting airborne ISR capabilities...

What could possibly go wrong?

They're sterile, so presumably the most that will happen is a temporary boost in the lizard and bird populations and a reduction in fruit fly populations over the next few weeks / into the winter. Highly unlikely this will trigger some runaway scenario. Smart to do this as things cool down.

>Strict procedures are now in place to prevent another accidental release of fertile flies, Dr. Leathers said.

From the article. Not exactly a completely unfounded concern.

knowing nothing about fruit flies I also have similar concerns.

The irradiation could cause random weird DNA permutations instead of just making the male fruit flies infertile?

Meh, our instinct is to assume that there is no free lunch but technological breakthroughs are full of free lunches.

Better and also not blocked for European readers: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/science/fruit-flies-los-a... (https://archive.ph/omrGI)

Thanks. However "This content is not available in your country/region" could have been the TLDR for anybody outside LA.

>Having been found in Hawaii in 1910, the flies had made their way to California by 1975.

These fruit flies are not available in your region.

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