It has generally caused little trouble this century because the main agent of transmission was a rather feeble insect, the blue-green sharpshooter, which cannot fly farther than three feet at a time.That changed with the arrival of its more robust, glassy-winged cousin, which lays eggs twice a year and can fly up to a quarter of a mile.
Not even Ed McGivern, a celebrated sharpshooter (who dented a quarter with his.38 as high in the air as I could toss it), would have survived that attack.The assailant always has the advantage, and he is not going to give his victim the opportunity to use a weapon.
Now it is pushing northwards, towards the more extensive and classy wine-making regions of Napa and Sonoma.To make matters worse, the sharpshooter is stirring up a nasty trade fight.
The females of this wasp hunt out sharpshooter egg masses and lay their own eggs there.
Its appetites spell trouble for California's vintners and their $2.8-billion-a-year 2.8-billion-a-year 2.8-billion-a-year 2.8-billion-a-year industrystern United States that was first spotted in California in 1990, is an eclectic eater that can consume ten times its own weight in an hour.The
The sharpshooter is a very effective transmitter of a bacterium, Xylella fastidiosa, that blocks the water vessels in plants, eventually killing them.The bacterium affects numerous species, including many that thrive on California's farms, causing diseases such as almond leaf scorch, phoney peach disease, alfalfa dwarf, and oleander leaf scorch.
Until recently, the insect mainly responsible for spreading Xylella in California was a leafhopper called the blue-green sharpshooter.
After a winter spent nestled amid the citrus leaves, the glassy-winged sharpshooter, a half-inch-long insect with a yellow speckled head, is rousing itself to look for a meal and a mate.
Scientists at the University of California at Riverside, near the first irruption of the sharpshooter, have high hopes of defeating their enemy by dispersing a tiny stingerless wasp from Mexico that lays its eggs inside the eggs of sharpshooters.The greater hope is to breed immunity into vines by genetic engineering.
At the rate the sharpshooter is advancing northwards, farmers may find themselves resorting to tall fences long before then.
HOLED up with a large-calibre American sniper's rifle in a ruined house on the slopes of the ethnic-Albanian quarter of Tetovo, the rebel sharpshooter could open fire on any target within 1,000 metres across Macedonia's second-largest city.
