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JON WILSONTimes Staff WriterVoracious vegetarians that threaten a $10-billion-a-year business meet their carnivorous match.
ST. PETERSBURG - Plant-eating pink hibiscus mealybugs have hit St. Petersburg and Ru Nguyen, a state entomologist, had a solution in his Windbreaker pocket Thursday.
He carried several thousand killer wasps in plastic vials.
The wasps, whose young suck out the mealybugs' bodily fluids and pop their heads off, look like your regular neighborhood wasp - under a microscope.
In the vials, they resemble tiny brown hair particles.
Natives of Egypt and Taiwan, they are on the front lines in the war against the pink hibiscus mealybugs - PHM for short - which showed up for the first time on Florida's west coast about a week ago.
The quarter-inch species - one of about 200 kinds of mealybugs - frighten agricultural scientists, nursery operators and gardeners because they can damage or kill up to 200 kinds of plants. They lay 600 eggs at a time and produce a generation once a month.
The state's nursery owners must pay close attention to guard an industry worth $9.9-billion per year.
"It's very serious ... it's one of those little critters that hops on everything," said Greg Charles, the longtime horticulture instructor at Pinellas Technical Education Center.
"I don't even think they have a clue as to the totality" of the number of plants the bugs threaten, Charles said.
State literature points out just a few, and it's a scary sample: hibiscus, citrus, guava, mango, avocado, tomato, cucumber and pepper. Numerous other vegetables, ornamental plants and fruit trees also are at risk.
The PHM gang, which infests tropical regions, reached the Caribbean in 1994, doing millions of dollars in damage to crops like beans, sugarcane and corn. It hit Florida two years ago and has been reported in Dade, Broward and Brevard counties.
Scientists from the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs are surveying Greater Pinellas Point and other neighborhoods to see if the mealybugs are spreading.
So far, it's hard to tell.
"It's a serious pest I think we've caught very, very early," said Pam Brown, Pinellas County's urban horticulture extension agent. But she cautioned that it is too soon to judge the problem's scope.
Phil Maguire, a Pinellas Point resident, was the first to spot the mealybugs in St. Petersburg. He reported seeing an odd-looking, whitish cluster on one of the plants in his lush back yard and told an agent looking for citrus canker.
On Thursday, Maguire ceremoniously launched the wasps' counterattack.
The former Boston resident chased the wasps out of a vial by tapping on its bottom, as state scientists, county plant experts and media watched.
The wasps are one way the state agriculture department tries to use biological means to control pests, rather than using pesticides.
"We're doing our best within the division to find alternative ways," said R.E. "Ed" Burns, plant industry division administrator.
Homeowners are discouraged from using pesticides to kill mealybugs because the poison also kills the wasps. Plants that might be infested shouldn't be cut or trimmed because hauling away the plants can help the bugs migrate.
Plants that might be trimmed already should be double-bagged in plastic and thrown into regular household garbage, not yard clippings.
Gardeners seeing whitish, cottonlike clusters on branches, twigs or leaves could have a mealybug problem. They should call the state hotline, 1-888-397-1517, or the county horticulture line, (727) 582-2110.
The mealybugs, which attack plants' leaves and flowers, do not hurt humans.
Neither do their enemies, the wasps.