Oregon State University professor releases destructive moths, wasps into orchards

Each week for the past three months Christopher Adams, a professor at Oregon State University, has released upward of 4,000 codling moths into the Columbia Gorge’s fertile orchards. The drab, half-inch nonnative insects don’t look like much, but when they lay their larvae inside apples, pears, walnuts or other crops, they wreak havoc. According to one 2018 analysis, they cost Washington apple growers more than half-a-billion dollars in damages. And that’s exactly why Adams has released the moths. No, he’s not an agroterrorist. Each moth he’s let into the wild has been sterilized. “These sterilized male and females fly around and mate with any wild (moths),” Adams says. “Because they are sterilized you don’t get any offspring.” Adams is an assistant professor of tree fruit bugology at Oregon State University’s Hood River extension

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