Two female Mediterranean fruit flies, or medflies, were found in Santa Clara County last week. The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) set up a 109-square mile quarantine zone to stop their spread.
For the next four to six months, CDFA will release 21 million sterile male medflies a week over parts of San Jose, Campbell, and Santa Clara. The goal is to stop medflies from reproducing.
That might seem like a dramatic response to finding two tiny bugs, each the size of a grain of rice — but it’s not. Medflies are invasive to the US, and can devastate crops. The last serious medfly infestation in California was also in the Bay Area, back in 1981…