A study co-written by a UF professor is taking a closer look at the reproductive habits of fruit flies in hopes reducing their population in Florida.
Lab-sterilized male fruit flies were released all over the state so that females would choose to mate with these flies instead of their fertile counterparts. New research published in the Journal of Economic Entomology in February may make this process more effective and less expensive.
Up to $6 million of Florida’s agricultural budget is being spent annually to help stop the spread of the Mediterranean fruit fly because of its devastating effect on the state’s agriculture, said Giancarlo Lopez-Martinez, an associate professor of biology at New Mexico State University.
The fruit fly can infest and consume more than 200 species of plants, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
The last time these flies invaded Florida in the 1990s, before this sterilization program was deployed on a large scale, it cost the state more than $20 million to get rid of them, said Daniel Hahn, an associate professor with the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences at UF.
Previously, the flies were sterilized by irradiation. However, the irradiation made the flies weaker and therefore less competitive for the female’s attention, Hahn said. The female flies chose to mate with the healthy, fertile fruit flies as a result.
“These are very competitive flies,” he said. “They get together in what are called ‘leks’ (an area where a group of animals carry on courtship behavior), where literally dozens of males get together, and it’s kind of like a fly dance club.”
The solution was to introduce a low-oxygen environment while the irradiation process is occurring, which allows the male flies to maintain their strength after the process.
The research of Hahn and his associates revealed the reason this process works. When the flies are sterilized in the low-oxygen environments, they produce antioxidants, which have been known to reduce the effects of aging and increase health span, Hahn said.
“Here we’d use the analogy of flies that get proportionally sexier as they get older, much like George Clooney,” Hahn said.
This could have further implications for farmers and taxpayers alike.
Rose Jean Joseph, a 20-year-old UF food and resource economics junior, said she believes the use of this improved research could potentially lead to the use of less pesticide.
“It’s more cost-effective for farmers,” she said.
Hahn said if they are able to increase the performance of the flies by at least 10 percent, it would save about 10 percent of the $6 million spent reducing the fruit fly population in Florida.
[A version of this story ran on page 5 on 3/12/2014 under the headline "Study co-led by UF professor aims to reduce fruit fly population"]
