Raising the Fertile Fruit Fly

I am indebted to the editor who passed me in the hall one day and said, “How do you raise a fertile fruit fly?”

I have been in this business many years and am not unaccustomed to editors growling non sequiturs as they pass, trapped as they often are in their own improbable worlds.

But I have learned that one never completely ignores an editor.

Years ago in Oakland a passing editor who wasn’t even looking at me asked, “How do you train a dog to dance?” and kept going.

I ignored the question and was chewed out later for being beaten by the San Francisco Chronicle on the famous Berkeley Dancing Dog story.

Editors, I learned from that experience, often assign stories in an offhand manner and expect at least a stick of type to result from their suggestions.

We don’t have sticks of type anymore, I don’t think, but an editor’s question, in whatever manner delivered, is still not to be taken lightly.

To the fertile fruit fly comment, therefore, I asked the man what he meant.

He said, well, if you wanted to be a Medfly terrorist and release flies capable of bearing young and waging war, where would you get them and how would you raise them?

Then he shrugged and went about his business, leaving the question, as we used to write, hanging in the winter air.

The man was alluding to a letter received by the mayor’s office from a group that calls itself the Breeders, claiming responsibility for the current infestation of the Mediterranean fruit fly in L.A.

The Breeders, according to the letter, want the aerial spraying of malathion to cease or they will spread fertile fruit flies throughout the state, thus placing California’s crops in jeopardy.

Fruit fly experts are unwilling to dismiss the letter as a joke because they can’t explain certain elements of the infestation. Meanwhile, they keep on spraying and hope for the best.

A good many non-terrorist citizens also object to the use of malathion, despite assurances that the chemical is harmless.

If it’s harmless, they ask quite reasonably, why are those living in the attack area cautioned to cover their cars and keep their children indoors during the spraying?

A spokesman for the state Department of Food and Agriculture assured me once that health concerns over malathion were blown out of proportion.

“We use 2.4 ounces of malathion mixed with 9.6 ounces of corn syrup per acre,” he said. “Think of it as a 12-ounce can of Coca-Cola. It’s nothing. In Europe, they use malathion to control head lice.”

I asked Don Henry, deputy director of Project Medfly, if it were even possible for someone to raise Medflies for the purpose of waging guerrilla warfare against malathion spraying.

He said, reluctantly, it was.

Henry indicated that anyone capable of raising orchids or African violets could raise a fruit fly, though not for the same purpose, of course.

“I don’t want to go into detail,” he said, “but you could raise a fruit fly in your garage.”

You have a fellow terrorist mail a larvae-infested mango from Hawaii and take it from there.

“In the Islands,” Henry said, “they raise 70 million sterile flies a week in an assembly-line lab. You couldn’t raise that many fertile ones, but you could raise enough to cause headaches.”

It is my understanding that sterile male fruit flies are encouraged to mate with fertile female fruit flies. I don’t know how they do that, but they do.

The sexual act, though no doubt personally satisfying to the fly, produces no offspring, a situation that, one hopes, will eventually eliminate the strain.

Henry says there are plenty of books available on raising insects that could be applied to Medflies.

“You don’t have to be an entomologist to raise Medflies any more than you have to be an ichthyologist to raise tropical fish,” he said.

He declined to go into specifics, fearing, I suppose, that the publication of details could serve as a kind of Handbook on Fruit Fly Terrorism. I wouldn’t want that.

If there actually is a group called the Breeders, their tactics in the end will serve us poorly.

For every fertile fruit fly the experts find, another Coke-sized can of malathion and corn syrup will be sprayed on us. While that might help with head lice, I’m worried about what it’s doing to our heads.

It’s just a question here of whether the fruit fly terrorists or the malathion lords prevail. Either way, we lose.