Ernest J. Harris found his life’s calling when his mother showed him a can of worms.

As a youngster on his parents’ 45-acre cotton farm near North Little Rock, Ark., Harris, now 88, became intrigued with insects while helping his mother garden.

“She had observed that the worms — actually moth larvae that ate her cucumbers and tomatoes — went into the ground during the day and came out in the evening to feed,” he recalls.

His mother plucked the larvae from the soil beneath the plants and put them in a can, where, unable to escape, they starved to death.

“She didn’t use any chemicals,” the soft-spoken Harris said with pride, in a low voice that retains a hint of a Southern accent, although he has lived in Hawaii for 45 years.

Dorothy Harris’ skill at eradicating pests without pesticides left a lasting impression on her son, who has spent most of his career in science combating the tropical fruit flies that cause devastating damage to crops in Hawaii and around the world.

An ecological entomologist, he uses a method known as integrated pest management in which synthetic pesticides are a last resort, Harris explained in an interview at his Kaneohe home, where he lives with his wife of 63 years, Bettye Jo Harris.

“We prefer biological methods like luring flies into traps, attracting them with a protein bait, overwhelming them with releases of sterile flies and introducing their natural enemy, Fopius artisanus, a tiny wasp that is a parasite on fruit fly eggs,” he said.

Because of his success in developing integrated, holistic systems of pest control, Harris was honored Friday at a banquet where he received an Outstanding Alumnus Award from the University of Hawaii College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources. He earned his doctorate in entomology at UH-Manoa in 1975.

A ROLE MODEL

Harris first came to Hawaii in 1962 as a research entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service. “He was one of the first African-Americans to go to work for the ARS,” said Roger I. Vargas, a USDA research entomologist who worked with Harris in the early 1980s, speaking by telephone from his lab in Hilo.

“He has been a role model for African-American scientists,” Vargas noted, citing Harris’ more than 100 scientific publications and his recognition by the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame and awards from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and its Hawaii chapter.

Harris had come a long way, graduating from an all-black high school in Little Rock, Ark., in the segregated South. With the goal of securing a higher education, he joined the Marines. In 2016, along with other members of the Montfort Point, North Carolina Marines, he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for the work they did in integrating that branch of the service.

The GI Bill allowed him to attend the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. After graduating with a biology major and chemistry minor, Harris was offered two jobs: janitor and high school science teacher. He turned both down, feeling unready to teach or to commit to the school for a year.

Visiting a friend in Milwaukee, Wi., he took a job in a foundry that made malleable iron products, and then a job at a factory that made glue to bind cardboard boxes. Always on the lookout for a chance to study insects, he worked as an aide to a forest entomologist in Minnesota who helped him gain admission to the entomology department at the University of Minnesota at St. Paul, where he earned his master’s degree in science.

TO GUAM AND AFRICA

Harris remembers arriving at Honolulu Airport with his pregnant wife and two small children in 1962 and being met by Loren Steiner, who led a Hawaii team of USDA entomologists working on fruit fly research in the Western Pacific.

“Dr. Steiner told me I was the first and only African-American in this lab at UH-Manoa,” Harris said. “He called a meeting on my first day and said to the staff, ‘We’re not tolerating discrimination.’”

From Honolulu the Harrises flew to Guam. He worked for a year and a half on releasing sterile fruit flies and luring and killing male fruit flies on Rota Island in the Northern Marianas.

“Ernie implemented the first eradication of fruit flies, using sterile fruit fly releases in Guam and the Marianas Islands,” said Luc Leblanc, curator of the William F. Barr Entomological Museum at the University of Idaho, who first met Harris while studying at UH-Manoa in 1997 and has remained a close family friend.

After Rota the entomologist was offered, and accepted, a job with the USDA North African Regional Mediterranean Fruit Fly Project, and the Harrises ended up living in Morocco and Tunisia from 1969 to 1972.

Bettye Jo Harris remembers being underwhelmed by the superior airs put on by her fellow Americans. She felt it was unjust that they paid their household staff such low wages, and trained local women in Western standards of cooking, cleaning and how to set a table so that they could earn better pay.

When Edgar Taylor, Harris’ boss at USDA, visited North Africa, Bettye Jo Harris threw a big dinner party in his honor. Harris credits her with Taylor’s subsequently appointing him to run the fruit fly research lab in Hawaii.

“That was fantastic, Dear, thank you for that,” Harris said, interrupting his story to turn to his wife, who sat beside him in the family area off the kitchen in their house.

“You don’t have to be a queen’s daughter to have a party,” she said.

Harris’ only regret is that, because he had to start work in Hawaii quickly, he didn’t get the chance to drive across the U.S. in the BMW he bought in Europe. He shipped it here instead.

When they returned to Hawaii, the Harris children attended Kailua Elementary School and Castle High School. Now Mark Harris is an engineer for the City & County of San Francisco, Tanya teaches Japanese at Waipahu High School and Gregory is a retired program director of Kama‘aina Kids.

“To keep our black culture we went back every two years to visit family,” said Bettye Jo Harris, who is also from Arkansas and was introduced to Harris by a mutual friend on a train platform en route to Milwaukee.

“Bettye Jo was part of getting the Martin Luther King state holiday here,” her husband said.

When her youngest child turned 10, Bettye Jo Harris went back to school and got a master’s degree in public health at UH-Manoa, then served as executive director of two nonprofit organizations: Kalihi Palama-Health Center and Hina Mauka, which helps people recover from addictions.

SECRET WEAPON

Perhaps the most dramatic of Harris’ achievements in Hawaii was the breeding of the fruit fly parasitoid wasp, Fopius arisanus, in captivity, which no one else had been able to do.

In achieving this milestone, he had to overcome not only the propensity of the captive wasps to produce too few females versus males, but also the resistance of his colleagues to the idea that an African-American could do it.

For this reason, he said, Harris conducted the breeding project in secret, without the knowledge of his superiors.

“I thought: What excites a male more than anything? More females!” he said with a puckish smile.

He and two colleagues, Richard Okamoto and Clifford Lee — whom Harris had sworn to secrecy — increased the ratio of females to males, and after 50 generations, they had enough females and could go back to breeding with one male and one female.

“And we had a colony going.”

Eventually, he said, “We got credit for methods used all over the world, because once we mastered rearing them in the lab, you can maintain the strain in the lab and if you have an outbreak, you can increase the numbers and release them.”

In addition to rearing the strain of Fopius arisanus that is most effective against the Oriental fruit fly, Hawaii’s No. 1 fruit fly pest, Harris developed strains that attack melon fly and Mediterranean fruit flies, Leblanc said.

Harris has trained local scientists and released sterile fruit flies or wasps in Reunion Island, Mexico, Chile and Africa. He has also made many friends, Vargas said.

‘AN EXCITING RUN’

On a hot, clear April morning, Ernest and Bettye Jo Harris rode The Handi-Van from their Kaneohe home to Gilmore Hall at the University of Hawaii, where some trays of Harris’ fruit fly and wasp specimens were preserved in a laboratory that also serves as a de facto insect museum.

They were greeted by graduate student researchers Camiel Doorenweerd and Brad Reil, who appeared not a little in awe of their distinguished predecessor as Harris walked to the cases and examined the insects. He stood very straight, shoulders back, with a gentle yet authoritative air, the Marine training still evident in his posture.

In contrast to the big, destructive footprint they had in Hawaii and around the world, the fruit flies were surprisingly diminutive, much smaller than the average house fly.

And the wasps, being fruit-fly parasites, were smaller yet: They resembled baby mosquitoes.

There was also a large handmade costume of a fruit fly hanging on the wall.

The winged suit was the idea of Leblanc, said Doorenweerd and Reil. (“Indeed I used to wear it every time children would visit the museum,” Leblanc confirmed via email.)

Harris smiled. “It’s been an exciting run with these flies,” he said.

Although he retired more than 10 years ago, at 77, the insect world still holds the same fascination for Harris as it did when he was a boy in Arkansas. Just last year, he and Vargas co-authored a study documenting the introduction of Fopius arisanus from Hawaii to Senegal to suppress an Oriental fruit fly outbreak there.

WASP VS. FLY

All fruit flies found in Hawaii are alien, introduced species, but not all pose a threat: “Some attack weeds, some don’t cause any harm at all,” said Roger Vargas, research entomologist at the USDA Agricultural Research Center in Hilo, who worked on fruit fly research projects with Ernest Harris before Harris retired. The pair continue to co-author scientific articles.

Four species of fruit flies in Hawaii, however, are serious pests: the Oriental, Mediterranean or Medfly, melon and Malaysian fruit flies, Vargas said.

Most serious, Vargas said, is the Oriental fruit fly, which originated in Taiwan and arrived in the islands after World War II. It lays its eggs in fruit, where its larvae hatch and feed, turning the flesh into putrid jelly. It attacks more than 300 cultivated and wild fruits including avocado, banana, bittermelon, citrus, coffee, guava, macadamia, mango, papaya, passion fruit, persimmon and tomato.

The next-most serious threat is the Mediterranean fruit fly, a native of sub-Saharan Africa that invades apples, apricots, avocados, dates, figs, grapes, loquats, lychee, mangoes, nectarines, papayas, peaches, plums, pears and more.

Hence the quarantine against carrying or sending untreated Hawaii fruit (with some exceptions) to the mainland and a reason for inspections at isle airports.

While some fruit flies do get to the mainland, large-scale releases of sterile flies have kept them from being permanently established in California and Florida, Vargas said.

Nevertheless, the Oriental fruit fly has spread around the world, most recently appearing in Senegal and French Polynesia, he added. In both places, large numbers of Fopius arisanus, the fruit fly’s natural enemy, were released, using techniques developed by Ernest Harris.

The tiny wasp plants its eggs inside fruit fly eggs. When the egg hatches, as with the spawn of the monster in “Alien,” out comes the parasite pupae rather than that of the host.

Such biological methods, Vargas said, are preferable to spraying the synthetic chemicals malathion and diazinon, which kill fruit flies but are also hazardous to the farmer and kill beneficial insects, including such natural fruit fly enemies as Fopius arisanus.