Invading Pest Intercepted At Gulf Port

Inspectors at the Port of Gulfport, MS, recently discovered a tiny hitchhiking pest in a shipment of bananas, which they said could have caused big problems to U.S. agriculture. According to a report last week in the Sun Herald of Biloxi-Gulfport (MS), during a routine inspection, agricultural specialists for U.S. Customs and Border Protection were checking over a shipment of organic bananas last month that came into the port from Colombia when they found an insect they had never before spotted.

The small, hairy, wormy-looking creature was so unfamiliar that Customs and Border Protection officials turned over a sample to experts at USDA, where it was identified as Faustinus rhombifer Champion (Curculionidae). Customs and Border Protection told the newspaper the insect is part of a species that feeds on vegetation, stems, and leaves “of a multitude of plants.” In other words, had the insect gotten into the U.S. through Gulfport, it eventually could have spread and devoured plants.

Officials at Customs and Border Protection declined to identify the shipper or fruit company involved, or the size of the banana shipment in which the pests were found. The agency did say the shipper was notified that the entire shipment had to be sent back out of the country.

This apparently was the first time the pest had been found in a shipment to the U.S. “The significance of this is that it’s a pest that has not been identified before,” Virginia Dabbs of U.S. Customs and Border Protection told the Sun Herald.

At the Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce, questions about the Faustinus rhombifer raised curiosity, but little concrete information. Sandy Havard, at the department’s Forestry Museum in Jackson, asked pest experts in the department for a rundown on the creature Thursday. “The only references they could find to it were in Spanish,” Havard said. “It’s not found in (North) America.”