#8 :: Insects at the Border
Intro music: "InsectaLoop" by Jake McCarthy.
JAKE Hello. you are listening to InsectaPod Cast Episode 8- Insects at the Border. InsectaPod Cast is a product of the Michigan state University Department of Entomology and its home on the web is www.insectapodcast.com. I'm Jake Mccarthy, the next voice you'll hear is Anna Fiedler's, and this is InsectaPod Cast.
ANNA If you’ve ever taken an international flight, you may remember moments of tension as you passed through customs, filing into a long line with your baggage as people in front of you answer questions, holding customs declaration forms and your passport. Customs and Border Patrol officers greet you upon return to the US. Some have a dog with them, but rather than being a drug-sniffing dog, it may be a beagle trained to smell agricultural products including fruit, vegetables, and other items that might harbor unwanted insect stowaways. Today, we talk about items some officers in the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol – known as agricultural specialists – are looking for, and why it’s so important that they find them.
To get an inside look at what happens to agricultural products once they are confiscated, we went to the offices and processing room of the Detroit Metro airport. We talked with Dan Lundgren, program manager of Customs and Border Patrol at the Detroit field office, as well as several agriculture specialists.
There are several primary tasks for agriculture specialists, who are working to protect homeland security. These customs and Border Patrol officers are trained to find agricultural items that could contain pests that were unwanted in the US, whether they come in on passenger luggage or cargo, in all manners of transport, including airplanes, boats, and cars. As opposed to most customs and border protection officers the training for agriculture specialists is more based on detaining products that are restricted than people. The agriculture specialists’ primary job is to stop items from entering the country and to locate restricted pests. They do initial identification to family or beyond, and the cargo is held until the pest in question – or images of it – can be sent to a USDA entomologist for identification.
DAN The agriculture specialist is, they are trained a little differently than your standard customs and border protection officer. The uniform is the same, the haircut is the same, everything looks the same. You are going to notice 2 differences: the agriculture specialist, or the customs and border protection officer wears a firearm. The agriculture specialist does not. The ag specialist’s primary weapon is basically their knowledge and their education. They have to have the equivalent of a bachelor’s of science, and many of the ag specialists that are being hired today have masters (10:50) or PhDs, quite often, in Entomology.
ANNA Agriculture specialists are a small proportion of officers carrying out this component of homeland security, in terms of personnel, there are 46,000 employees overall in customs and border protection, about 2,200 of whom are agriculture specialists. While customs and border protection’s mission includes protecting against terrorism it also addresses “fostering our nation’s security through lawful international trade and travel”. CBP Agricultural Agents identify and asses the risks different agricultural products could pose to American food sources. If certain insects with no natural predators in the US have the potential to damage crops if they remain unchecked, CBP agents know about them and they’re waiting just past the arrivals gate, ready to identify exit holes in fruit and larvae wriggling around in vegetables.
ANNA This is the case whether insects come in on passenger luggage or cargo, through all methods of transport, including airplanes, boats, and automobiles. CBP Agricultural Agents learn which shipments, during what time of year, and from what country, are likely to contain quarantined pests. This allows them to focus their efforts on shipments apt to be a problem. We asked what they actually see in cargo shipments:
DAN If you can imagine it, it comes in. So, yes, fresh fruits, flowers, vegetables, plants. Detroit sees a good diversity, not near the diversity that we get through some of our larger ports, like Miami, LAX, JFK. But, we get a lot of fresh-cut flowers: daffodils, tulips, irises, lilies, a lot of orchids, sembidiums, dendrobiums. And there, we do get a fair amount of bugs off of them. The wood packing material can be on anything. This is Detroit, it is automotive. A lot of our automotive supplies do come in packed in wood packing material from another country, and most of them, the great majority of them, are very compliant, good. But occasionally, a shipper or exporter from another country will ship something here that has not been properly fumigated or treated. There are insects in it, unbeknownst to the company here in the United States (8:45) when they receive it, because they didn’t order bugs, it just kind of happened to be on the shipment with it. Some of them are hitchhiking bugs that come on after it’s been packaged. The plane is actually physically being loaded, and it’s being put on. Other times, it’s the live insects were cut, the wood was cut, the insects are inside of it, and unlike our Lowe’s and Home Depot here, everything that gets cut and packaged over there is not pressure treated, heat treated, and so if you don’t do that, you can end up with live insects underneath.
ANNA Agriculture specialists are practiced at remaining calm as they explain to passengers why items must be confiscated, and are skilled at looking for and identifying pests in agricultural products. Because so many passengers are on each flight, the chance of finding contraband in passenger baggage is much greater than in cargo planes. People who arrive in Detroit, sometimes in the US for the first time, often bring oranges, yams, or flowers from overseas with them. These items can all harbor insects and are all restricted. Most of the time, CBP officers simply confiscate the contraband, but Dan pointed out that it’s not always that simple. For some people these items contain a great deal of meaning and people get upset when they’re confiscated.
ANNA Is it difficult to explain to people when you’re taking items from them, whey they shouldn’t have brought them, or why they can’t have them? Is there any difficulty with understanding?
DAN It varies as much as the people do (12:18). Yes, many people can understand it after it’s explained to them, and they’re very compliant and very polite. Some of the people, you’re taking something away from them. Because they’re coming here to visit family and friends. It’s their one gift, it’s their fruit from their backyard. It’s the goat that they raised and are bringing for a wedding, you know, they’ll have goat meat. And to take that away, you’re taking their culture, their only present that they’re going to present to someone, and you are offending them. So, that can be difficult, and if you add on top of that that they’ve been on a 12-24 hour flight, it can be a little stressful. But the agriculture specialists are very (13:00) well trained in trying to do this. We do it day in and day out, and we do a pretty good job.
ANNA The confiscated items could carry a variety of diseases; Dan listed avian influenza and hoof and mouth disease as recent pathogens officers are trying hard to prevent in the U.S. In addition, products may be infested with insects that are not currently present in the U.S. Some of the insects, such as Mediterranean fruit fly, would cost billions of dollars by preventing the U.S. from exporting some types of produce to other countries, through direct crop damage, and costs associated with increased pesticide use. People from all cultural backgrounds enter the U.S. on international flights, so Dan has seen – and confiscated – a variety of unusual cargo. He described a woman in a wheelchair who had an “unusual odor” coming from her. It turned out that she was carrying unprepared goat meat from an animal that had been slaughtered before her flight.
DAN I’ve seen everything from live birds in pockets, and 24 pigeons in a duffel bag, that had been, each one been put into a sock. I’ve had the end of a sock cut off, and a bunch of the birds are dead. The passenger literally puts the bag on the x-ray machine and walks on through, like it’s his carryon luggage like nothing’s [ab]normal. Well, the agriculture specialist who was in training - we were watching the cargo, watching it go through, and he was like “hey, look at the bird figurines, how much are those worth?” (14:39) and I said, “those figurines have spines on them” because you can see that in the x-ray. I’m like, “how many live birds do you have in that bag? And then, of course he was very forthcoming, the passenger, in answering the questions.
ANNA After they confiscate items, Agriculture specialists take them to a back room where they put fruits and vegetables in one set of large garbage bins and meat in a second set of bins. They then go through the fruits and vegetables when there are no passengers waiting to go through customs. They search the material for quarantined pests in order to determine what might have entered the U.S. otherwise, and what they should be on the lookout for in the future. They are, essentially, assessing the risks associated with different types of agricultural products brought into the U.S. While we were with Dan, agents brought in several bags of fruits and vegetables from the baggage floor.
Sound of bags being opened, banging, chatting.
DAN What we’re looking at here is the fresh fruits, vegetables, plants, seeds, and soil that comes off the baggage floor. It’s all put into the quarantine barrel here as it’s acquired on the baggage floor, and then when there’s a down time, the agriculture specialists get to come back here and go through it and actually find the insects, plant material, disease, you know, whatever, pull it out, identify it, and then actually put it down our garbage disposals. The garbage disposals that we are putting it down, these are two 5-horsepower garbage disposals. So if you imagine the little ¼ horsepower one that’s in your sink, these are 5, so this is bigger than a lot of lawnmowers. So it takes about everything.
ANNA Dan also explained that if something in the material somehow survives the trip through the garbage disposal, pathogens and insects will not survive the trip to the wastewater treatment facility. There is a lag before material gets to the treatment facility, when material is in pipes with no oxygen and reaches an extremely high pH. Meat is handled a bit differently: it is taken to a quarantine facility and incinerated or steam sterilized, then put into a sanitary landfill. This process kills any pathogens the meat could contain.
Agriculture officers sift through quarantined items, cutting fruits open in search of larvae, and breaking open pieces of wood or bark brought in for medicinal purposes. For many, it is the highlight of the job. Dan mentioned that one year he reached his personal goal of submitting 100 quarantine-significant pests.
ANNA So, you guys have these giant bins here. You have two. Do these ever fill up?
DAN Yeah, occasionally. But most of the time the ag specialists are wanting to go through. I mean, these are the prizes, these are the bugs, this is the fun part, okay. Arguing with the passenger, filling out the paperwork, going through the dirty luggage, dirty underwear and everything like that, not the most fun part of the day. This is it. Usually, if there’ a break these guys are back here going through things. And then, you know, if we can find the insect (17:42, CBP2) that has never been found in the United States before, CBP agriculture specialists do it countless times on this contraband table a year. . . .
ANNA Because there are airports and ports all over the country with international flights and shipments, CBP agriculture specialists are needed throughout the U.S. Dan pointed out that this can be a great opportunity to move somewhere new, if that’s what an applicant wants. At a given location, there will be agriculture specialists with degrees from all over the country, in topics including entomology, horticulture, plant pathology, mycology, and ecology. Agriculture specialists work as a team, and all need to be able to identify general pests that come in, but they also each have areas of specialty and can rely on other officers’ strengths, as well. The day we visited, a large variety of items came through, some of which were not directly for eating.
ANNA So, why might someone come in with this material here, it looks like, not even big enough to be firewood, but some sort of kindling, almost.
B: This was brought in from Laos, as medicine, folk medicine. A big part of our educational effort with the Hmong people from Laos is to bring this in in fine enough particles that we don’t have to seize it. We tell them, the size of a pencil or smaller, it’s enterable under our current regulations. Larger pieces may contain the larvae of insects, they’re not allowed to come in. So, we do deal with a lot of these people on a day-to-day basis.
ANNA This is one way that customs and border patrol has tried to work with passengers to allow them to bring in culturally significant items. Agriculture specialists also see a large number of bananas, apples, and oranges. Those, they told us, are not high risk simply because they’re so commercialized. Other fruits are a greater concern and the agriculture specialists scan them more carefully to find the prize – a quarantine-significant pest.
CBP AGENT You know, we get apples, oranges, and bananas right and left (12:29) and they’re very low-risk because they’re so commercialized. But, good stuff like this, you never know. This is from some grandma’s backyard in the Philippines, so. This is called a star-apple. I’ll cut one in half for you.
Cutting sound
That’s a star apple, because it looks like a star. Some bitter melons . . . these are a variety of eggplant. In the eggplants you can find insects like thrips or, shoot, coming from the Philippines, you could find anything in there. There could be insects inside the eggplant, there could be insects that just like to hang out underneath the calyx of the plant . .(pause) . We get these from Africa, too. I’ve never actually found these from the Philippines, so when I opened this up this morning, I was kind of excited. In the Philippines they call them garden eggs, or, I mean, in Africa, they call them garden eggs.
ANNA Agriculture specialists not only learn what pests to look for, they become familiar with a variety of fruits and vegetables that are uncommon in the U.S. Items range from apples to kola nuts and fresh almonds and olives They also learn to, as one officer put it, be “very careful sniffing things”. Some items have strong odors we are not familiar with, and others have begun to decompose before their arrival. The day we visited, one officer found a bitter melon, from the cucurbit family, full of insects.
CBP AGENT There’s exit holes in this cucumber thing, so maybe we’ll find some bugs.
Sound of produce being split apart split
Oh, yeah. Fruit flies. It’s loaded with Tephritid fruit fly larvae. Can you see them?
ANNA This officer found a number of fruit fly larvae inside of one fruit that fits in your hand. She prepared a specimen to submit it to the USDA entomologist for final identification; identification to the species level involves considering the country of origin, what the insect was collected in, and using minute characteristics only visible when the insect is mounted on a slide. If this fruit hadn’t been confiscated, the overripe fruit could have been thrown into a compost pile, where the potentially dangerous insects would thrive.
The fruit fly larvae we saw were quite mobile; some had exited the fruit and were inside the plastic bag the fruit arrived in. Meanwhile, another officer used a screen to sift potential insect pests from a bag of seeds. Dan told Gil he knew the point of departure for the flight from which the seeds were confiscated, and also knew that this material, coming from that area of the world, at this time of year sometimes harbors one of the bugs most unwanted in the US. Like most of the insects identified and destroyed by CBP, he said, there would of course be chemical ways to deal with a population that got through the border, but in this case prevention is safer and more effective than the cure.
DAN The insects that Gil is looking for, this is commonly referred to from Africa as cucurbit seeds, melon seeds that are dried, and they’re bringing them here to the United States. You get a lot of stored grain pests in them. Most of the time it’s just a cigarette beetle, powder post beetle, something to that effect, but what has been found on numerous occasions, right here in this office, is Khapra beetle. Trogoderma granarium. One of the USDA’s most highly quarantined significant pests. They’ve, uh, that pest being introduced into the United States, into a warehouse, greenhouse facility, into the agriculture community, it’s very tough to control. The only thing we really can regulate it or destroy it with is methyl bromide, which is an odorless, colorless, and actually, greenhouse gas. We would prefer not to have to use that treatment, and so by actually quarantining this like this, hopefully we can prevent from using one more pound of pesticides.
ANNA All CBP agricultural agents have the equivalent of a bachelor of science degree, but many have advanced degrees in a variety of fields , as well. One agent we spoke with had an Animal Science Masters and Entomology PhD, both from Michigan State. Dan said he understands that performing research is an attractive endeavor for many scientists, but that the training and hands-on experience CBP affords, combined with the excitement and unpredictability of catching bugs in a busy international transport center makes being a CBP Agricultural Agent a great choice for lots of recent graduates.
DAN Unless you’re a PhD doing research, I can’t think of anyplace else that’s really, that you can come to work every day and look at bugs, sit in the lab, work with a half dozen, dozen other scientists, and get excited about finding bugs, every single day. Identifying them, getting them down to- who can get it down to genus, who can get it to species, who can get the right number correctly, so many times in that the USDA recognizes the authority, saying- hey, you’re proficient enough at this pest, we’re going to give you authority to say you are an authority now on releasing this cargo on this pest. And that’s a real feather in (31:06) a lot of people’s caps. And think about it, once you get here, you get out of college, you get into the US department of homeland security, customs and border protection as an ag specialist, you’ve got a full background field inspection on you, you’ve been put through training where you can look at international cargo, find pests from around the world, identify them, know what’s significant and what’s not, what job could you not apply for that that wouldn’t be a major coups on top of your resume. And you didn’t have to pay for it, unlike a PhD. You were actually, this is actually paid experience, hands-on real world training, that a lot of employers are really looking for. And if you don’t like it here in Michigan, hey, we employ around (31:50) the whole United States.
JAKE Thank you for listening to InsectaPod Cast Episode 8, Insects at the Border. InsectaPod Cast is a product of the Michigan state University Dept. of Entomology and is funded in part by the Ray and Bernice Hutson Memorial Entomology Endowment. Our home on the web is www.insectapodcast.com. If you would like to learn more about agriculture specialists with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol visit www.usajobs.gov. I'm Jake McCarthy, my partner is Anna Fiedler, and this is InsectaPod Cast.
