Fighting bugs with bugs.
On a hot Wednesday morning in early June, Joseph Bravata pulled a black SUV with federal plates into a suburban playground parking lot outside New Orleans. The asphalt was bounded on the north by a tangle of oak and tallow trees, and to the east it faced a subdivision with big lawns and wide streets. Bravata, the US Department of Agriculture ’s state plant health director, opened the trunk, revealing a white cooler which had arrived via FedEx the previous morning.
Inside were six clear plastic containers, full of stingless, parasitic wasps, each the size of a poppy seed. As the sun warmed the containers, the wasps sprung to life, and began bouncing up the sides of the plastic like popcorn., prey primarily on Asian citrus psyllids, gnat-like, sap-sucking insects. The tiny wasps lay eggs under the bodies of psyllid nymphs, and their larvae grow by eating the host and sheltering in its husk. A single female can eat at least 500 pests over her short life.
One by one, Bravata twisted off the container lids and—with a few taps of encouragement—the wasps disappeared into the warm breeze to look for prey. Scattered through the surrounding neighborhood were citrus trees—satsumas, kumquats, and oranges—all now home to psyllids. The psyllids are native to Asia, with populations distributed from Pakistan to Vietnam.
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