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Insect Find Threatens Wineries

Posted on: Friday, 9 September 2005, 18:00 CDT

Sep. 9--A pest with the ability to devastate the county's $160 million wine industry was discovered this week 14 miles from the nearest vineyard, Agricultural Commissioner Eric Lauritzen said Thursday.

An inspector from the commissioner's office found a single glassy-winged sharpshooter Wednesday in a residential Salinas neighborhood near Highway 101, the city's airport and the Elk's Lodge.

"The immediate effort," Lauritzen said, "is to ensure that this is the only one."

On Thursday, eight staffers from the commissioner's office combed a quarter-mile area around where the sharpshooter was found in a sticky, yellow trap, looking for the winged pest and for remnants of any of its eggs. Thirty-five more traps were set up to catch additional finds.

By the end of the day, the team had come up empty-handed, he said.

By itself, the glassy-winged sharpshooter is perhaps as harmless as a butterfly. The danger with the leaf-hopping insect comes from its ability to carry Pierce's Disease, an incurable grapevine killer.

In 1999, researchers discovered that the pest -- which originates in Southern California and travels mostly through nursery shipments -- had the ability to spread the disease when it destroyed 14,000 acres of grapevines in the Temecula area of Riverside County and then shifted north into Kern and Tulare counties.

More recently, glassy-winged sharpshooters have been spotted as close as Santa Clara County. But in Monterey County, Wednesday's discovery was the first find unrelated to a nursery plant shipment, Lauritzen said.

Since the 1990s, agricultural officials and growers across the state have been vigilant in their watch for the glassy-wing sharpshooters, dedicating millions of dollars for nursery shipment inspections and projects testing pesticides to prevent its spread. In July, California grape growers voted to tax themselves through 2011 to provide funding for more research.

In Monterey County each year, about $220,000 is spent for glassy-winged sharpshooter inspections of incoming nursery shipments, education and outreach. Traps, set up all over the county, are checked daily.

Hearing that only one glassy-winged sharpshooter had been found, local vintners and industry consultants reacted Thursday with cautious relief, praising the agricultural commissioner's office's hawk-eye-sharp watch for the pest.

Corky Roche, a Salinas-based vineyard consultant and founding member of the Central Coast Pierce's Disease Task Force, said he believes it is safe to assume that the one glassy-winged sharpshooter is all there is.

"The county will be looking very closely at it," Roche said. "It's still a major concern for us."

With the inspection program and a statewide pilot project involving pesticides that kill adult and "nymph" glassy-winged sharpshooters on nursery plants, Roche said many in the industry "feel the barn door is pretty well closed right now."

"I think this will keep it in the forefront of everyone's mind. It's not something we can really drop our guard on. Local ag commissioners are doing a thankless job. It's really thankless to be trapping continually and working behind the scenes, but it's really important."

"The old saying is you let a little bit get a toehold, it's difficult to get a hold of," said Kurt Gollnick, chief operating officer of Scheid Vineyards, who called the disease, "the death sentence for grape vines."

"It's appropriate for the commissioner to act very carefully and in a thorough fashion. I really respect him for getting on it. Besides that, we all like to drink wine."

GLASSY-WINGED SHARPSHOOTER FACTS:

--Description: half-inch long, dark brown with small yellow dots on head and thorax. Wings are translucent with reddish veins

--Found: One sharpshooter was found in a Salinas residential area

--Threat: The insect carries Pierce's Disease, which attacks grapevines, jeopardizing Monterey County's $157 million wine-grape industry

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Copyright (c) 2005, The Monterey County Herald, Calif.

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Source: The Monterey County Herald (Monterey, Calif.)

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