A typical quarantine treatment for fruit flies is developed by testing hundreds of thousands
of lab-reared insects, which are artificially inoculated into the fruit, so-called probit 9 (99.9968% mortality) level testing. Development of an irradiation quarantine treatment for
mango seed weevil has been difficult because there is only one generation of weevils per
year, and no artificial diet exists to culture the insect in the laboratory. Therefore, probit 9
level testing is impractical. Instead, we pursued an alternate approach: to generate data for
an irradiation treatment with the numbers of insects available, and to show that the weevil
would have no economic impact on fruit production and negligible impact on mango
germplasm if it were introduced into the U.S. mainland (Follett 2000, Follett and Gabbard
2000). If the risk of mango seed weevil could be put in perspective, regulators could be
convinced that a safe quarantine treatment could be developed by testing only a few thousand
insects. In this paper, I present the evidence for an effective irradiation quarantine
treatment to disinfest mangoes of mango seed weevil.