Millions of Irradiated Flies to Be Released in California… Again

Residents in the South Bay might want to keep their windows shut tight in the coming weeks, as state officials gear up to unleash a swarm of government-engineered flies from the skies.

What sounds like a scene from a dystopian thriller is actually the latest move by the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) to tackle an invasive pest, but it raises plenty of eyebrows about just how far bureaucrats will go to meddle with nature—and at what cost to everyday folks.

According to a CDFA news release dated August 21, 2025, two female Mediterranean fruit flies—known as medflies—turned up in San Jose earlier this month, prompting a sweeping quarantine across roughly 115 square miles of Santa Clara County. The restricted zone snakes through parts of San Jose, Santa Clara, Campbell, and Los Gatos, where locals are now forbidden from carting homegrown produce off their properties to avoid spreading the bugs. These tiny invaders, barely a quarter-inch long with their golden hue and penchant for ruining over 250 types of fruits and veggies, aren’t just a nuisance—they’re labeled a “significant, clear, and imminent threat to the natural environment, agriculture and economy of California,” per the CDFA’s emergency proclamation.

“Unless emergency action is taken there is high potential for sudden future detections in Santa Clara County,” the proclamation warns.

To squash the threat before it spirals, the plan calls for dumping 250,000 sterile male medflies per square mile each week over an 85-square-mile radius around the hot spot. It’s all part of the so-called sterile insect technique, a bug-world version of population control where irradiated males mate with wild females, leading to dud eggs and a dying breed. Officials tout it as a green alternative to dousing everything in pesticides, but skeptics wonder if flooding the air with lab-tweaked critters is really the harmless fix it’s cracked up to be.

The operation kicks off with fly factories in Guatemala and Hawaii churning out colonies, which get shipped to a CDFA hub in Los Alamitos down south. There, the pupae get zapped with radiation—“the pupae are poured into tubular plastic bags” that are “placed one-by-one into an irradiator… for several minutes,” as the process goes—rendering them sterile and marked with fluorescent dye for tracking.

The department hauls in over 223 million of these prepped pupae every week, packing them with ice for the trip. Once airborne over the Bay Area, “they’re just released out of the bottom of the cabin,” explained Ken Pellman, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Agriculture Department, in a prior chat with SFGATE. “It’s quite an interesting operation down there,” he added.

This isn’t California’s first rodeo with medflies or aerial bug drops. Back in the 1980s, a massive infestation locked down the state, pitting farmers against environmentalists in a bitter fight over pesticide sprays that Governor Jerry Brown eventually greenlit amid protests. Things got weirder when a shadowy group calling themselves “The Breeders” admitted to unleashing thousands of medflies to sabotage the spraying program, racking up $60 million in crop damage and making the whole ordeal feel like a homegrown eco-conspiracy. They vowed to render the aerial attacks “politically and financially impossible,” and while the group faded, questions about deliberate pest releases lingered.

Fast-forward to today, and the sterile fly program has been humming along since the mid-1990s as a “preventative” measure, with no major outbreaks in places like Los Angeles since its start. Just this year, the CDFA wrapped up a similar blitz in Alameda County, where they dumped millions of sterile medflies starting in April and declared victory by August 4, lifting the quarantine without fanfare. But with invasive flies popping up again so soon in nearby Santa Clara, it’s hard not to wonder if porous borders or lax trade policies are letting these threats slip through, forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for endless sky-high interventions.

Critics of past efforts pointed out that sterile releases alone have never fully eradicated a medfly population without backup from malathion sprays or other heavy-handed tactics. And while the CDFA insists this method is safe and eco-friendly, the idea of government planes blanketing neighborhoods with irradiated insects stirs up uneasy vibes—echoes of those 1980s battles where public health clashed with agricultural demands, and whispers of ulterior motives in pest control programs that seem to benefit big ag more than the little guy.

For now, South Bay dwellers dealing with the quarantine or incoming fly showers can ring the CDFA’s Pest Hotline at 1-800-491-1899 or check their site for details. But as these operations ramp up, conscientious patriots might ask: Who’s really watching the watchers when it comes to tampering with our skies and soil?

In a state already burdened by overregulation, this latest bug barrage feels like another layer of control wrapped in the guise of protection.