In a creative and sensible rebuke to nuking neighborhoods with pesticides, the state of California has chosen to release sterile hybrids of the light brown apple moth to reduce populations of the marauding insect.

Since its invasion in March 2007 of the United States, the Australian light brown apple moth, or LBAM, has been fluttering up and down the California coast, leaving a wake of fruit and vegetable-munching, leaf-rolling caterpillars behind it. Scary, especially for a state making $32 billion dollars a year from agiculture.

But planned summertime sprayings for LBAM, at least in urban areas in California, were put on emergency hold by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Local governments, including Santa Cruz County (expected to be hardest hit by LBAM), expressed concern over potential human health and environmental side effects from the pesticide - a synthetic pheromone that confuses the moth’s reproductive cycle.

So instead of pesticides, California Department of Food and Agriculture has decided to release tens of thousands of sterile moths into wild populations. The sterile moths will provide an end-of-the-line outlet for many would-be reproducers, shrinking next year’s populations. Released annually, the sterile moths could become increasingly effective at hammering away at LBAMs populations.

Envirovore will be interested to see the effects of using these sterile moths in place of pesticides. In the meantime, the citizens and Gubernator of California should be commended. Their concerns for their health and their environment forced them to display out-of-the-box thinking in relation to pest management - at least in urban areas.

Via The New York Times

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