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Inside-Out Killer

Monday October 24, 2005

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For Californian grape growers fighting the glassy winged sharpshooter, help may be on the way in the form of a tiny wasp.

Glassy winged sharpshooters help spread a strain of plant-damaging bacteria, Xylella fastidiosa, and have been a pest to southern California vineyards for more than a decade. Now farmers are reporting that this pest, which originates from Texas, has made it to Hawaii and Tahiti.

For more than a decade scientists at the USDA's Agricultural Research Service have sought an environmentally friendly method of controlling the sharpshooter, and a South American wasp may fit the order.

Gonatocerus tuberculifemur wasps are 15 to 20 times smaller than sharpshooters, but it's their even smaller offspring that kill off the sharpshooters. They lay eggs inside the sharpshooter's eggs, and when the young wasps emerge from their eggs, they eat the sharpshooters' eggs from the inside out.

This method of pest control has so far been successful in the laboratory, but the wasps have not yet been released into the wild. This research is detailed in the current issue of California Agriculture magazine.

--Bjorn Carey

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Credit: Reyes Garcia III 

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