NZ: Auckland fruit fly operations get a spring boost - FreshFruitPortal.com

NZ: Auckland fruit fly operations get a spring boost

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NZ: Auckland fruit fly operations get a spring boost

New Zealand's Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) is doing one final push in Auckland this spring to complete its Queensland fruit fly eradication program.Auckland

The pest was first found in Grey Lynn back in February, and since then a range of activities has been carried out to get rid of it.

A Controlled Area was put in place with restrictions on the movement of fresh fruit and vegetables outside of this area. These movement restrictions remain in force for now.

A small number of properties with infestations of the fruit fly were treated with insecticide sprays and ground treatments. All fruiting trees within the Controlled Area had bait applied to attract and kill adult fruit flies.

In addition to the treatments, MPI extended its existing network of surveillance traps to locate any flies that could remain in the area. No flies have been trapped since March 2015.

MPI’s planning manager Edwin Ainley said fruit flies tended to be inactive over winter, but now is the telling time.

"Now that the weather's warming up, if any flies did manage to survive the earlier treatment blitz, they'd be on the wing and we'd trap them in our extensive network of lure traps," he said.

Ainley said MPI had recently resumed more frequent checking of the surveillance traps in the 'A Zone' of the Controlled Area, closer to where the original flies were found.

"Residents in this central A Zone can expect to see officials checking the traps twice weekly now," he said.

MPI is confident of success in the fruit fly eradication but Ainley said it needed these next couple of months of trapping to verify this.

"We can't assure our trading partners that the population is gone until the empty traps confirm our success. At this stage, we hope to declare eradication and end the movement controls on fruit and veges before Christmas," Ainley said.

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