New Fruit Pest Could Pose Problems

New Fruit Pest Could Pose Problems. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

If you have been anywhere there are fruit flies you know how annoying they can be but their primary food source is rotten fruit. Now a new invasive pest has been discovered, Drosophila suzukii, the spotted wing Drosophila. Dr. Helmuth Rogg, Entomologist with the Oregon Department of Agriculture.

ROGG: What they do first they cause cosmetic damage because when the female, they actually pierce the skin of the fruit and then they lay their eggs underneath the skin just like a regular fruit fly, the Mediterranean Fruit Fly. The maggot goes inside and causes damage to the fruit while it’s still hanging on the tree or the bush.

Which means this fruit fly attacks fresh fruit essentially destroying the fruit. It was first discovered in California.

ROGG: We started to look around in Oregon, in particular in the valley all the way down to Medford collecting fruit, we found it from about Roseburg all the way up to Portland.

Rogg says there have also been reports in Washington and even into British Columbia. At this point there are few options.

ROGG: Over here in the valley we’ve seen it on blackberries, we’ve seen it on blueberries, we’ve seen it on peaches and very likely the next thing that is going to come up is going to be grapes so this is a bit of concern in particular of fruit that very shortly will get harvested so there’s not very much you can do in terms of chemical control on that.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.