The plant was introduced into Florida by developers about a century because of its ability to dry up wetlands.

You see, back then, wetlands were considered bad for business. Now, we need them to provide water for our cities.

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/cerc/danoff-burg/invasion_bio/inv_spp_summ/Melaleuca_quinquenervia.html

Unless they can come up with some biological control for it, an insect that eats it, or a disease that attacks it, and which is no threat to anything else, I’m afraid its going to win. A targeted chemical like you posit would certainly be ideal. If you can invent one I guarantee you will become a very rich man.

It’s easy to say “Why don’t they just cut the Melaleuca down, or burn it off?” But until you drive through some of the vast areas infested by it, you simply cannot imagine what a problem this is. You can destroy a huge stand, but if you miss even one, in a few years they are back. To use a medical term, it has metastasized.

It doesn’t just occur in forests, there are also isolated trees and small stands everywhere, from the middle of town to out in the boonies. You can’t find them all, much less go to where they are and destroy them. and any one can be a new vector for infection.

As you surmised, the trees would have to be identfied and injected by hand, with followup monitoring. Time consuming and expensive, but doable. The hard part would be getting the goverment to recognize the threat, and to set up an initiative.

I can’t think of any method today that would target a specific DNA without being hazardous to other organisms as well, for example, if we sprayed Melaleuca stands from the air with a toxin targeted to its DNA, it might be disastrous if some other organism’s nucleic acid could be affected by the toxin.

It could probably be done in the lab, or one tree at a time, but that wouldn’t be very effective as a means of biological control. Broad-spectrum genetic poisons sound like a potential nightmare to me. Too many things could go wrong.

Just a suspicion.

I don’t think its even worthwhile fighting these invaders anymore. We should just surrender the state to them, let them take over, and concentrate our resources where the Florida Peninsula is narrowest, just S of where it joins North America, draw a line there and try to hold them, keep them from spreading.

Let the State become an ecological free-fire zone, and use the resulting monotonous biological desolation to rub into the faces of those who think preserving the environment is purely an esthetic exercise, a waste of time we can no longer afford. The pest vegetation complements the human landscape of parking lots, strip malls and high-rises beautifully.