….and will be much missed on Lanzarote.
The Mealy Bug, says my wife, is a tiny white creature, bigger than an ant but not as big as a bluebottle. The pests seem to attack plants of all varieties in our garden and prevent them from flowering. Sometimes they get into the soil and attack the roots.
Their numbers are legion.
They cause havoc in our garden and my wife, Dee, reckons they are the same bug that is not only ruining our garden, in Playa Blanca in the South of the island but has even brought to an end to the island´s prickly pear industry.
The Mexican cochineal has destroyed the plantations of Mala and Guatiza, in the North, leaving behind a huge vistas of diseased and dead vegetation.
The once fertile and unique cultivation of prickly pears in Guatiza is today a vista of utter desolation. More scientifically known as The Dactylopius Opuntiae, the Mexican cochineal, first landed in the Canary Islands in the area of Fuencaliente, in La Palma, Over the years the bug seems to have had its passport stamped as it has travelled to each of the islands and wreaked its havoc.
“The entire ecosystem of prickly pears in Guatiza and Mala has been destroyed because the Mexican cochineal has wiped out all the prickly pears,” explains Leandro Caraballo, an agricultural technician.
Caraballo points out that “it entered through La Palma, although it is difficult to know how it did so, whether it was mixed with other tropical fruits, but it was introduced in 2013, destroyed the prickly pear trees in La Palma, moved to Tenerife and from there, to Lanzarote.”
Dee and I remember spending a holiday on Lanzarote before coming to live here in 2015 and we saw the devastation left behind by the swarms of locusts that had been blown off course and literally scythed through La Geria and other cultivated areas of the island.
It seems the Mexican Cochineal is similarly aggressive !
As Dee, the self-appointed Charlie Dimmock, in our household, explains this type of insect is very difficult to combat.
Leandro Caraballo, the agricultural technician explains that it attacks both “the young shoots and the trunks and the root system, and ends up destroying the plant until it finishes off the crop.”
When the bug was first identified in Lanzarote, it was thought it had only just arrived, but experts then realised that it had already been on the island for some time. The Canary Islands Government initiated some action, washing the prickly pears with some products they felt might deter the bugs. However their action proved ineffective ´because of the pest’s great capacity for dispersion´.
So quickly has this infestation devoured what seems to be its favourite source of nutrition that Lanzarote farmers and scientists alike now consider the prickly pear, and the industry it generated on Lanzarote, as dead.
“The cultivation is finished so now we have to find a viable alternative for the whole area where the prickly pears were and get farmers to cultivate the area,” Carabello has advised.
He says we have to forget about prickly pear cultivation, unless another predator, an insect, a virus or a fungus appears that eliminates the bug.
With the Lanzarote prickly pear, another symbol of our island has disappeared, and experts are saying that this has been the final blow to the cultivation of prickly pears.
TV wildlife presenter, David Attenborough, tells us regularly on his programmes that every change to habitat and climate forces symbiotic species to alter their travel paths and feeding patterns and the truth of what he says is writ large across the former prickly pear fields.
Not only has an important food source been lost but also a special habitat is being lost that served as a refuge for species such as rabbits and partridges, which fed and took shelter in this valuable natural space that has now disappeared.
Nor should it be ignored that this somehow changes the landscape of an entire region in the North of Lanzarote. A swathe of greenery now looks like a wild-west graveyard.
Of course, the cochineal was a couple of hundred years ago a source of the fabulously red coloured dye that earned Lanzarote so much trade and income over a long period before cheaper artificial dyes became prominent.
If the insect is what my wife says it is, then it seems we have just witnessed another savage chapter in the battle between Mealy Bug and Man.
Lanzarote, however, will adapt. Our rock hard landscape provide again, as it did after the volcanic eruptions of the seventeen-thirties and the occasional locust swarms.
As for our garden, who knows? only my wife.
