With pests like possums, rats, stoats and gorse already devastating the landscape, you might be forgiven for thinking the fight is already lost. The warriors from MPI say otherwise. On their website they have a hitlist of, wait for it, 15,706 unwanted organisms lurking at our doorstep trying to slip in and wreak havoc. Everything from Abagrotis barnesi, an insect known as the "climbing cutworm" through to a fungus called Zythia aurantiaca.
Enemy of the month, the Queensland fruit fly, sounds scary enough, itching to munch away at 100-plus species of fruit and vegetables, but it has nothing on the Asian brown marmorated stink bug, which has been caught 13 times in the last five years trying to sneak into the country, most of these attempts in the last six months.
The stink bug is on MPI's 10 most unwanted organisms list, up there with foot and mouth disease. It's a voracious feeder and MPI says "almost any crop is at risk", including fruits, asparagus, corn and even roses. Native to China, Korea and Japan, it's now established itself across most of the United States. Recently it has been found hitching a ride into New Zealand in cars and machinery imported from the United States, leading to new rules this month forcing all machinery, used cars, trucks, boats and parts from the US to be heat-treated or fumigated before shipping to New Zealand.
Not only do these beasts represent a grave risk to the economy, they also favour coming inside to breed, stinking out the victim's home.
In December it was a 15cm Giant African Snail brought back from Madagascar as a souvenir, complete with eggs and an appetite, not just for tree and crops, but the paint and stucco from the side of houses.
Then, lurking just over the horizon is mosquito-borne chikungunya, a viral disease sweeping through our Pacific Island neighbours causing fever and joint pains. It's got the All Blacks, due to play in Samoa in July, scared. Luckily, at this stage the Asian tiger mosquito that spreads it has failed to establish itself here, but not from want of trying.
But a cousin in the Aedes mosquito family has been here since the 1920s and dominates my backyard with its distinctive black and white striped legs, as though it belonged. Which is why I got quite excited when I saw headlines referring to aerial spraying to combat the latest Grey Lynn invasion. Then I looked closer and saw I'd missed the "No". Which was a shame.
If I could have persuaded MPI to mix a dose of Bti - a well known, mosquito wriggler-only killer bacteria - into the fruit fly insecticide, and expand the death zone a little to cover my place, I could have looked forward to a mosquito-free autumn.
I can vouch for Bti. Ten years ago, a mosquito eradication expert took pity on me after I bleated on about these new mosquitos that had taken up residence in my yard and struck at any time, unlike the more genteel native variety, which preferred to snooze when the sun was out. He dipped into his big tank and gave me a small bottleful of the stuff to water down and spray around the garden. It worked.
That bottle has long since run out, and it doesn't appear on garden centre shelves. An aerial spraying of the stuff this month - or every month - would have been great.
