Glassy-Winged Sharpshooter Egg Masses Destroyed In Napa, Sonoma Counties

NAPA COUNTY - An egg mass of the glassy-winged sharpshooter, a disease-spreading pest, was found in Napa County and destroyed earlier this month, officials with the Napa County Agricultural Commissioner's Office said today.

The egg mass was discovered on March 7 on a tree shipment from Orange County where the insect established itself in the early 1990s.

Napa County officials alerted agricultural officials in other counties and inspectors in Sonoma County found an egg mass on a tree shipped from the same Orange County nursery.

Sonoma County officials had those trees destroyed.

The pest is native to the Southeastern United States, according to the University of California Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program. The pest spreads Pierce's disease, which is fatal to grape vines, Napa County Agricultural Commissioner Greg Clark said.

The egg mass was detected through a surveillance program established to detect the glassy-winged sharpshooter because Pierce's disease is already spread to grapes grown in the county through native means.

The glassy-winged sharpshooter would make things markedly worse, Clark said.

"It only takes one introduction to have a population established, which we don't want," Napa County Assistant Agricultural Commission Humberto Izquierdo said.

Napa County officials considered the mass a viable threat when it was found on a single tree.

The shipment of eight trees was from a nursery in a part of Orange County not considered infested with the glassy-winged sharpshooter. Crews inspected the rest of the tree shipment and found no other life stages of the sharpshooter.

Officials issued a rejection notice for the shipment and each tree was cut at its base, double-bagged in plastic bags and buried deep in a landfill, Izquierdo said.

More shipping restrictions and treatment requirements have been imposed on the nursery where the trees came from.

-By Bay City News Service, image by Insects Unlocked, and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.