Today I was working in the garden when – surprise! – I found a brown garden snail. A thorough check of nearby lettuce yielded three more snails. I brought them inside and put them in a jar to let the kids see them. These snails are actually the same species you pay top dollar for in fancy French restaurants. I found escargots in my salad. According to a little bit of internet research, the snails were brought to America by an enterprising Frenchman hoping to make money selling escargots during the Gold Rush, but the French delicacy didn’t really catch on. With his business idea a failure, he tossed out his snails… and they became an established pest here in the U.S.

This is rather interesting, in light of some research I’ve been doing about California’s efforts to eradicate the light brown apple moth (LBAM), an invasive pest from Australia. They were found in northern California a few years ago and the state’s Department of Food & Agriculture (CDFA) decided almost immediately to institute frequent aerial spraying in several counties. The CDFA’s plan runs entirely counter to science for a number of reasons. First, LBAM isn’t that serious a pest anywhere in the world – and the moths have many natural predators.  

If you ask me, the brown garden snail is a much more serious pest, and it’s also invasive, even if it’s not as recent a newcomer as the LBAM. But instead of blanketing the entire state – including densely populated urban areas – with pesticide, there’s a quick and easy solution for the brown garden snails. Actually, there are several. In my own yard, I’m releasing decollate snails, which prey on garden snails. Traps using beer to drown the snails work pretty well too. And I’d much rather suffer a bit of damage from either a moth or a snail than see the entire area where I live doused with pesticides. You could easily use the same non-toxic tactics to deal with LBAM, like creating habitat for its predators in agricultural areas.

The real question isn’t which pest is worse, but why our government gets to decide which invasive pests are serious and which aren’t, and which ones should be eradicated. Especially because scientists have shown that almost no pest has ever been eradicated in the entire world. At a talk I attended a few weeks ago, entomologist James Carey told of ONE pest he’d heard of that was successfully eradicated. It was a pest in New Zealand that was only dispersed within a half square-mile area and to get rid of it, they sprayed and sprayed and sprayed again many, MANY times.

A National Academy of Science panel found that the USDA “did not conduct a thorough and balanced” scientific analysis when it classified the LBAM as a major pest. They also did not test the safety of Checkmate, the pesticide they chose to spray, (a pesticide that is manufactured by Suterra, a company owned by Stewart and Linda Resnick, who are major campaign donors to a number of politicians within the state) and ignored previous research that found safety problems with that particular spray. And they didn’t do a very good job even making sure that the spray was evenly mixed and would be evenly dispersed in a way that would be effective on the moths. Initially, they didn’t even want to bother with Environmental Impact Reports either. When they did spray, in Monterey, they said that the spray would not effect the marine sanctuary… but it did.

As of now, aerial spraying is not planned, but spraying from the ground is, along with use of pesticide laden twist ties. Ground spraying is not as innocent as it sounds, if it will be anything like recent spraying for the gypsy moth in Ojai, CA. In Ojai, the spray crews brought cops and warrants and sprayed private property, even against the wishes of residents. In the case of Ojai, they sprayed Bt, a pesticide widely used in organic agriculture. But while state spraying is upsetting for environmentalists and gardeners (and using Bt instead of other, more toxic sprays might reduce opposition), it actually made some people sick. When the state decides to spray, they don’t care if you’ve got asthma, and they’re going to spray you anyway, even if it makes you sick. You can hear testimonies from those who were sprayed in Ojai in this video.

In a bankrupt state like California, spraying for LBAM is not just a violation of our rights and a display of the government’s flagrant disregard for science, it’s also a tremendous waste of taxpayer money.

Ok, so last week, I thought all this hubub about the Light Brown Apple Moth was much ado about nothing. I hadn't even seen one, and they didn't seem to be bugging me.  So, I didn't get what Arnold's big rush to spray pheremones or what not on to the Bay Area.

Things have changed. Last week a friend of ours was over at our house. It was a fine afternoon, the weather was nice, so we spent the time chatting outside.  We get to the conversation of this little moth. Turns out that our friend, a big shot lawyer at a video game company to remain nameless, is the patient zero of the Light Brown Apple Moth scourge upon her city.  She claimed they were all over her apartment, and sure enough, we went down there, and there they were. Sneaking around her place. I put the pieces together, she travels all over the world for work, and she has tons of them in her house.  How much more evidence do we need? Well, how much more was answered the next day when we saw some of the little buggers around our house.  Now the things are all over our house.  Apparently the've really taken to the Bay Area, and I'm pretty sure she's the vector.

Now, they don't seem to be really bothering me at this point here in SF, they're just annoying. But, I say, get some helicopters or bush planes, or whatever it takes, in the air, and let's get to dumping all sorts of chemicals on my fair city. What's a little caplet of inhaled pseudo-moth pheremones compared to some bugs in my house? What could possibly go wrong when we drop a chemical on to heavily populated urban areas? Really, I can't think of anything. Sure, some judge said the state can't spray, but whatever, let's do it anyway. 

Ok, I kid, but follow me over the flip..

The LBAM is an interesting parable of our increasingly globalized society. Bugs from other parts of the world are here. Some are annoying, and some are real problems. The problem with the LBAM isn't necessarily what it does or doesn't eat at this point, the damage totals are mere guesses.  But from most reports that I've read, it seems that the LBAM is a bad thing, but it is no MedFly. But what's more disturbing is the failure of the state and federal governments to have early warning systems and clear protocols that allow for public comment and discussion.

The LBAM was found by a retired UC-Berkeley entimoligist in his backyard, but nobody was actively looking. Nobody.  The next great super-pest could be reaching our shores today, and we likely wouldn't know for years. With the food supply getting tighter and tighter as the world's population grows, we need to learn how to better manage non-native pests. We need to be vigilant from a planning perspective at the front.  Because an ounce of prevention is worth a few tons of cure here:

The light brown apple moth, the ravenous crop-eating Australian pest detected in at least 11 California counties since mid-March, “was probably here a very long time prior to its discovery and it’s probably far more widespread than currently delineated.”

***

“However, once a pest has a major foothold, it’s very difficult to eradicate it,” said [UC-Davis entomologist James R. Carey]. “While state and federal agricultural officials often talk about eradicating a ‘population,’ in reality, this requires eradication of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of mini-populations/pockets. Thus, anything short of 100 percent elimination of these thousands of pockets is control, not eradication.”

From the perspective of a city-dweller, we need to be prepared to explain, and back up with hard evidence, any proposed or actual treatments for the pests. It's not that urban residents are distincty opposed to measures against these species, it's that, in the case of the LBAM, nobody bothered to explain to us what was about to be dumped on to our cities.  That's why the residents (and elected leaders) of the County of Santa Cruz and other localities fought the spray so hard. It's not that the name sounded a bit scary (which it did…Checkmate, yikes!), it's that there were no conclusive studies showing the safety and efficacy of these synthetic pheremones.  It's that nobody bothered to mention until a few days that we would soon be inhaling Checkmate into our systems. Heck, in SD-03, all three candidates, Leno, Migden, and Nation, are talking about this little moth more than you could possibly imagine.

Thus there are competing forces here, because eradication requires speed, and due process requires a deliberate, uh, process. Of course, we can gain extra time through better advance detection, but we also need to improve our preparation for future pests. So, better research, but also a streamlined system that will allow public debate over whether the ends justify the means for each insect.