Starting next month in Marion county, scientists at Oregon State University will release a parasitic species of wasp to control an invasive pest that infests fruits as they ripen, costing half a billion dollars worth of crop damage each year in the U.S. The spotted wing drosophila, a fruit fly native to Southeast Asia, was first detected in Oregon in 2009 and costs the state’s blueberry industry alone more than $10 million in losses annually. It took scientists more than a decade to gain approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to release the parasitic wasp, which is also native to Southeast Asia, in Oregon and other sites along the West coast this summer. Vaughn Walton, a horticultural entomologist in the College of Agricultural Sciences at Oregon State University, joins us to explain the latest efforts to control this invasive pest in Oregon and the West coast.