Loofah package from Tanzania used to smuggle invasive wasps, other bugs, officials say
A package from Tanzania intercepted en route to the West Coast was listed as containing “dried loofah” — but that’s not all U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents found when they opened it in Tennessee.
The old cardboard light bulb box was also rife with live bugs, officials say.
The shipment was headed to Oregon when agricultural specialists with U.S. Customs stopped it in Memphis on March 2. They found three dried loofahs, several wood chunks and two species of insects inside, customs officials said in a news release.
The insects weren’t declared, the package did not contain a USDA import Permit and it hadn’t been addressed to a plant inspection station as required, customs officials said.
The person who was slated to receive the bugs also reportedly lacked an import permit.
Entomologists who later inspected the insects identified them as Mantodea and Torymidae, which are forms of praying mantises and wasps, respectively, customs officials said.
“If this wasp was to go at large in the timber industry in Oregon, that could be dangerous,” Agriculture Specialist Supervisor Nancy King said in the release.
According to the customs office, praying mantises are “normally predatory, and the wasps found are frequently a parasitoid.” A parasitoid is a type of insect that lives on a host — eventually killing it, according to the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University.
The wasps can also be “plant-eating” and are “known to exploit Atlantic white cedar seed,” customs officials said.
That means they could be particularly dangerous to cedar trees in Oregon. Both bugs also run the risk of spreading diseases to plants and killing native insects, according to the release.
Customs officials said everything in the box was “destroyed” by steam sterilization, a common disinfection process that uses moist heat, according to the CDC.
In 2019, Customs and Border Protection agents reportedly stopped more than 300 “pests” from entering the U.S. on any given day. This also isn’t the first package from Tanzania that officials have found with illegal insects, plants and animals, officials said.
“The motivation for ordering the dangerous insects from Tanzania is unclear,” customs officials said in the release.
This story was originally published March 15, 2021 at 1:50 PM with the headline "Loofah package from Tanzania used to smuggle invasive wasps, other bugs, officials say."
