Worth saving
Every autumn, our family give away something like 60 kilograms of feijoas, bagging the fruit up as it drops and lugging it to the gate. But this year, on February 20, a single male Oriental fruit fly was found in a surveillance trap down the road. A well-rehearsed strategy kicked in. Overnight, regiments of biosecurity wheelie bins appeared on the streets. The neighbourhood was divided into “zones”, and in ours, homegrown fruit was not allowed to leave the property. The feijoas fell and fell, and then the apples were upon us too. For a week or so, I filled the freezer, then I gave up and just started dumping boxes of fruit. The controls were not lifted until April 10: seven weeks. I checked our pheromone traps every day. Growing up on an orchard, we were acutely aware, even us kids, of the risk of a pest turning up. At airports, Mum and Dad would grumble that our bags, our shoes, weren’t being checked thoroughly enough. In 1999, the painted apple moth popped up in West Auckland, and Dad berated the TV when “those bloody Aucklanders” complained about the aerial spraying. The government put $65 million into eradication and we considered it money well spent. Biosecurity was a necessity, not a nuisance. But at New Zealand Geographic, I have come to understand that biosecurity is a two-tiered operation. Up top are the pests and pathogens that threaten farms, orchards, and growers. The fruit flies. The painted apple moth. We spent $50 million without blinking to get on top of Psa-V, a bacterium that hits kiwifruit; that’s nothing compared to what we’ve dropped on Mycoplasma bovis, which sickens dairy cows—it’s taken more than eight years and $886 million and we’re almost in the clear. All of it money well spent. But there’s another set of invaders that we are so soft on, we might as well usher them in. Kauri dieback and myrtle rust, for example, both exotic fungal diseases that are now smashing through centuries-old taonga trees. The alga Caulerpa made itself known four years ago and now covers more than 1500 hectares of seabed, smothering everything that lives there. Many people are working desperately hard to hold the line but it’s nothing like the efficient, aggressive machine that goes to work when cows are at risk. This is largely because industry bodies have standing agreements with the government about how they’ll work together to see off certain threats; this makes for a much faster and more organised campaign. Crucially, industry can also help pick up the tab: about a third of the total, for M. bovis, and about half for Psa-V. The pōhutukawa, the kauri and the pāua have no such fund to draw on. So our biosecurity response, when it’s only nature at stake, tends to be reactionary and fragmented; we’re not ready, we don’t organise with due urgency, and most of all we don’t spend, not on the scale we need to. And so, naturally, the exotic interlopers are getting away on us. Despite the name, the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) is not meant to be all about livestock and crops. It is legally mandated to protect our environment—the bush and the streams and the birds and everything else, the stuff that doesn’t have a dollar sign attached because it’s priceless, the stuff of life. But the priority on protecting commercial interests seems institutionally baked in. Last year, a conservationist fighting myrtle rust in the East Cape forests told me he was hoping the fungus would annihilate commercial feijoa crops, too, or the mānuka used for honey, because then the eradication effort might see some real money. What of Steatoda nobilis, the invasive spider on our cover? It will, MPI acknowledges, probably prey on endemic insects, spiders and lizards (many of which are already endangered because they’re eaten by so many other pests). But it won’t hassle cows, or layer hens, or kiwifruit. So the biosecurity response is one big shrug. On a global heatmap predicting this spider’s favoured habitat, New Zealand is lit up red and orange. Welcome home, S. nobilis. You’ll like it here.
