[senortumnus]

Curious paragraph at the very end of the NYT’s article on this:

“ On average, it takes 28 flights per week to cover a 1,750-square-mile region, according to the state Food and Agriculture Department. To combat the Leimert Park outbreak, officials said they would divert two flights per week to target the affected neighborhoods.

Strict procedures are now in place to prevent another accidental release of fertile flies, Dr. Leathers said. “We really need to make sure there’s a lot more sterile flies out there, than the wild flies,” he said, “to make it more likely to work.””

Thats the end of the article. No mention of accidental release of fertile flies elsewhere in the article. Article burying the lede?

[CobrastanJorji]

They're presumably referencing a major fruit fly fuckup from back in 1981. In 1981, there was an outbreak of "medfly," the mediterranean fruit fly. It was a big economic disaster for California. The reaction was crazy. People were up in arms. The state started spraying chemicals on everything. But environmentalists were like "hey, um, maybe spraying a bunch of pesticide on everything isn't great" and the governor was like "yeah, I'm gonna not aerially spray everywhere." But then the Federal government stepped in and ordered we spread it everywhere. The medfly thing was bonkers. Years later, there would be a whole insane side plot where a terrorist "medfly breeders" group would send notices to newspapers that they were secretly breeding more medflies.

Anyway, during this insane hullaballoo, one of the alternatives to spraying that they tried was releasing a bunch of "sterile" male flies that they somehow got from Peru. I have no idea what Peru reportedly did to sterilize them (maybe they had a different breed?), but whatever it was was wrong, and California ended up dumping a few hundred thousand perfectly virile male flies out.

Here's an old news story about the accidentally fertile medfly thing: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/10/us/fertile-flies-released...

And here's a video about the general medfly California crisis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQfhZ1JYUDE

[taskforcegemini]

then chemtrails pretty much are real after all

[klyrs]

No, they aren't. Aerial spraying is used in agriculture, by crop-dusting planes flown at low altitude. This is how pesticides are delivered, in small and large treatments.

Contrails are real. They're a cloud formation caused by engine exhaust at high altitude.

Chemtrails are a stupid conspiracy theory wherein contrails are imagined to be chemical sprays. If spraying was done at such high altitudes in California, most of it would end up in the ocean, or perhaps the Rocky Mountains.

The conspiracy theory "works" because it conflates an unintuitive physical phenomenon with a known-bad prior government action. But in reality, it relies on deep ignorance of physics.

[dekhn]

aren't contrails still Bad?

from https://blog.google/technology/ai/ai-airlines-contrails-clim...

"""Contrails — the thin, white lines you sometimes see behind airplanes — have a surprisingly large impact on our climate. The 2022 IPCC report noted that clouds created by contrails account for roughly 35% of aviation's global warming impact, over half the impact of the world’s jet fuel."""

[soco]

Yeah and it's called pollution, which is why some are advocating we just fly less to Cancun, Malle or anywhere else.

[ge96]

> contrails

usually it's the engine exhaust right

[klyrs]

Whoops, you're right. Corrected.

[Johnny555]

I was wondering that too, the closest I could find was this (but was not fruit flies and not in the USA):

https://entomology.umd.edu/news/hunting-the-flesh-eating-scr...

One unique difficulty arose in 2003 when the radiation apparatus that sterilized screwworm flies malfunctioned, resulting in the accidental release of fertile flies in Panama. Although this was a significant setback in the screwworm eradication program in Central America, Dr. Welch and others from the USDA worked tirelessly to correct this error