Infestations

Uninvited visitors have wormed their way into Hawthorne's kitchens and bathrooms. A minor infestation of bloodworms--larvae of the gnat-like midge--is forcing the city to purge its municipal water system, which serves about half of Hawthorne's 12,000 households and businesses. The scarlet creatures, although unnerving to residents who have been finding them in their water glasses and bathtubs since last week, do not pose a health hazard, officials say.

Just before Thanksgiving a few years back, Raquel Lopez fielded her umpteenth call of the day to find an irate man on the line. Someone had littered his lawn with Butterball turkeys. "This is not funny!" he shouted, demanding the shrink-wrapped birds' immediate removal. It was another priceless moment for Lopez, who has been answering L.A.'s 311 information line for seven years. CITY BEAT: Life in Los Angeles "We're like a human Google," she said, laughing one recent morning as she sat, headset on, in a gray cubicle on the 10th floor of a building across Main Street from City Hall.

Leaders of California's $1.6-billion citrus industry said Monday that a disease that was killing orchards worldwide was now rooted in Mexico, and experts warned that it was headed toward the state. Citrus greening disease has infected six citrus trees on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, spread by an infestation of the Asian citrus psyllid. There's a virtual insect highway across the width of Mexico, and once the aphid-like insect hops on, California is in trouble, said Beth Grafton-Cardwell, a UC Riverside entomologist and director of the Lindcove Research and Extension Center, east of Visalia.

Armed with a new county report citing the health dangers of feces, urine and hypodermic needles recently found on Los Angeles' skid row, city officials could resume controversial cleanup sweeps of the downtown area's streets and sidewalks. The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health inspected a nine-block area and discovered human waste, injection needles, condoms and a rat infestation in violation of county and state health codes. City officials say they have cleaned up the waste and debris cited by inspectors last month.

What if you threw a bedbug party and everybody came? That's kind of what happened at the two-day Bedbug University: North American Summit in Rosemont, Ill. About 200 people were turned away from the sold-out session that brought together diverse professionals such as medical researchers and exterminators, according to a story in the Chicago Tribune. How you get rid of bedbugs, which can cause nasty red welts, was addressed by 50 or so vendors who displayed their techniques at killing the critters.

California agricultural officials will release hundreds of tiny, stinger-less wasps this month to combat the fruit- and leaf-eating light-brown apple moth, in a move to find alternatives to aerial pesticide spraying. The California Department of Food and Agriculture will deploy the wasps, no bigger than a grain of rice, in San Luis Obispo and Sacramento counties and may expand the program to other counties with more serious infestations. The wasps lay their eggs inside light-brown apple moth eggs, where they incubate until the larvae emerge and kill the developing moths.

They're nearly always pregnant, like the mythical tribbles of "Star Trek" fame. They pass through gullets of fish unfazed. And they could bring disaster to native bugs, frogs and steelhead restoration efforts in the Santa Monica Mountains. New Zealand mudsnails have taken over four watersheds in the Santa Monica Mountains and are spreading fast, expanding from the first confirmed sample in Medea Creek in Agoura Hills to nearly 30 other stream sites in four years. The invasive species, found in many waterways in the U.S. West, the Great Lakes and Canada, reproduces asexually, so "it just takes one to infest a water body," said Mark Abramson, a stream restoration expert for the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission.

Five nationally known experts in the study of red fire ants will tour ant-infested areas of Orange County today to assess the danger from the aggressive species that has colonized nurseries, backyards, parks and fields in several cities. The experts were invited by officials at the California Department of Food and Agriculture who are concerned about the ant outbreak, the largest and most widespread ever recorded in California.

A chemical assault on an invasive seaweed that threatened marine life along the coast appears promising, marine researchers said. An initial treatment of concentrated chlorine has killed patches of the plant and much of its roots. The plant has been flourishing in a half-acre of the Agua Hedionda Lagoon, 20 miles north of San Diego. Scientists estimate it will take at least three months to completely rid the lagoon of the plant.

A small infestation of Mediterranean fruit flies has been found in Hyde Park, representing the first return of the pests to the county since 1997, state agriculture officials announced Thursday. Plans include increased releases of sterile male flies and ground treatments within an eighth of a mile of the southwest L.A. site beginning Monday and continuing at 10- to 14-day intervals for about six weeks, said Steve Lyle of the state Department of Food and Agriculture.

William Perez has been waiting a long time to tell someone all the sad and crazy things he's seen. Perez runs a crew that crisscrosses Los Angeles and the Antelope Valley doing the dirty but essential job of cleaning up homes that have been foreclosed and then trashed by humans and neglect. "The good news about this place," he told me as we stood inside one such property on Wilmington Avenue in Watts, "is that there's no fleas. " No fleas, but plenty of trash, and an odor most foul.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has weathered a lot of criticism over the years, but nothing like the broadside that hit it from inside. A departing executive in the firm's London office accused Goldman in a newspaper column Wednesday of losing its moral compass and being overtaken by a greed-infested corporate culture. "I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it," Greg Smith, who quit as head of the firm's U.S. equity derivatives business in Europe, wrote in an opinion piece in the New York Times.

The giant black metal gate slams shut, click, locked, leaving the scrubbed faces of the Sacred Heart High basketball players alone with the weathered streets of Lincoln Heights. The girls collectively sigh. They shake away the worry that stretches from the bob in their ponytails to the dirt on their sneakers. They begin their daily journey. For the next 15 minutes or so, covering a mile that feels like a marathon, the 10 players will walk or jog through a neighborhood that will stare and scowl.

For roughly 24 hours, Facebook's news feed was not a family-friendly place. Facebook acknowledged Tuesday that the social networking site was briefly infested with a mix of hard-core pornographic images, doctored pictures of celebrities in sexual situations, photos of extreme violence and even a picture of a beaten dog. Facebook said it had identified the problem — if not the culprit. During the attack, users mistakenly downloaded programming language that resulted in their sharing offensive images on Facebook without knowing it, a company spokesman said, adding that the website's engineers were working on a fix. Facebook said it built mechanisms to quickly shut down the malicious pages and will put users who were affected by the offensive spam through "educational checkpoints" so they know how to protect themselves.

Zone One A Novel Colson Whitehead Doubleday: 260 pp., $25.95 Colson Whitehead really couldn't have picked a better time to write a zombie novel. Even looking past its Halloween-adjacent release date, "Zone One" comes at a time when such horrors are enjoying a pop culture renaissance that arguably began with Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" in 2002. In recent years the fascination has grown to include fan conventions, groaningly slouched "zombie walks" through city streets and the splatter-core success of AMC's adaptation of the graphic novel series, "The Walking Dead," which drew record ratings in its season premiere.

It started when an El Monte woman called to report an unusual pest: tiny mosquitoes that she said were biting her in the middle of the day. The complaint last week raised red flags for technicians at the San Gabriel Valley Mosquito & Vector Control District, who know that common mosquitoes typically attack during morning and evening hours. When a worker arrived at Dodson Street, one of the insects landed on his partner, so he trapped it in a plastic jar. "He took a close look at it, and he realized we might have a problem," said Kelly Middleton, a district spokeswoman.

Experts see signs that the infestation of Mormon crickets that has plagued Nevada for six straight years, with swarms stretching across millions of acres, may decrease this summer. The insects, which got their name after nearly destroying the crops of Utah's Mormon settlers in 1848, infested about 12 million acres in Nevada last year, roughly the same acreage infested in 2004. That made last year the first since 2000 that the acreage didn't substantially increase.

Northern San Joaquin Valley farmers and agricultural commissioners went on alert this week after glassy-winged sharpshooters were found in San Jose. Officials trapped nine adult sharpshooters and found a nymph and an egg mass in San Jose during the last two weeks. Adding to the concern, officials have been unable to locate the source of the infestation. The sharpshooter carries the bacteria for Pierce's disease, which chokes a plant's ability to absorb water and nutrients.

The largest river restoration ever attempted in the West — intended to support a cornucopia of wildlife and outdoor activities — has left a 62-mile stretch of the Lower Owens so overrun with cattails, cane and bulrushes that it may take decades to bring them under control. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa turned a knob in 2006 that opened a diversion dam gate about 235 miles north of the city, putting water back into a river essentially left dry after its flows of Sierra snowmelt were diverted to the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913.

Linda Cree and her husband haven't dared to go outside to sit by their pool in the two months since furry black bats began invading their Moorpark backyard. They found three drowned in the pool, she said. Some flopped around on the ground in a pitiful death dance before growing still. She found one clinging to her screen door when she went out to get the morning paper, said Cree, 65, a homemaker. Of the eight bats she reported to Animal Control, seven tested positive for rabies.