‘Horrifying’: Hawaii woman said she found 60 CRB larvae in a bag of soil she bought from Lowe’s

What looked like a simple gardening purchase quickly turned into something far more disturbing for one Oahu family, and in his report for Hawaii News Now, Aalii Dukelow showed why the discovery has struck such a nerve in a state already battling one of its most destructive invasive pests.

According to Dukelow, Waialua resident Wendy Manalo bought three bags of discounted soil from the Lowe’s Home Improvement store in Waipahu, thinking she had found a decent deal for a home project. But when she opened one of those bags the next day, she said what spilled out was not just dirt. It was a mass of coconut rhinoceros beetle larvae, or CRB grubs, packed inside a bag she believed had been sealed and intact.

For anyone who has followed Hawaii’s long fight against the coconut rhinoceros beetle, the story is unsettling on its face. For a homeowner who suddenly finds dozens of larvae in a product meant for planting, it is the kind of surprise that feels less like a nuisance and more like a scene from a nightmare.

That is exactly how Manalo described it to Dukelow. She said it felt “like out of a horror movie,” and honestly, that is not hard to understand once you hear the details.

A Sale Bag Of Soil Turned Into A Bucket Full Of Grubs

Dukelow reported that the sale at the Waipahu Lowe’s had lured Manalo in. The soil was selling for around five dollars a bag, which made it appealing enough for her to buy three. At first, there was no sign anything was wrong.

Manalo told Hawaii News Now that after bringing the bags home, she left them outside overnight on a retaining wall. The next day, when she opened one of them, she immediately realized something was off. She said she pulled out one grub, then another, and then kept going.

She told Dukelow that she ran to get her phone because there were so many. Then she grabbed a bucket, dumped the soil into it, and started sorting through the contents by hand. By the time she was done counting, she said she had found more than 60 grubs.

That number alone is enough to make most people stop cold. One or two might sound like contamination. Sixty sounds like a full infestation.

Her husband, Joe Manalo, told Dukelow he heard her scream and came to see what had happened. He said when she showed him the grubs, they were both freaked out. He described them as roughly the size of shrimp, which made the whole thing even more bizarre and harder to dismiss as some small fluke.

And what made the story stranger, according to the Manalos, was that the bag did not appear damaged.

Why The Sealed Bag Detail Is Important

One of the most notable details in Dukelow’s report was Wendy Manalo’s insistence that she usually checks bags of soil before buying them, especially for holes. She said she does that partly because she does not want dirt leaking in her car or trailing behind her as she drives home.

So when she opened this bag and found it crawling with larvae, she said it stood out because the bag she had purchased seemed intact. That matters because it raises the question that probably occurs to anyone hearing this story: how did that many larvae get into a bag that was supposedly sealed?

Dukelow noted that when he later went to the Waipahu store, there was a hole visible in the last remaining bag of the same Sta-Green brand soil that Manalo had purchased. That does not prove the grubs entered Manalo’s bag through a hole after purchase, but it does show the store’s soil inventory was at least not uniformly pristine.

The sealed-bag issue is also why this story reaches beyond one family’s bad gardening experience. If an infested bag can wind up in a customer’s car and then on a residential property, that becomes more than a customer service problem. It becomes part of a broader invasive-species problem that Hawaii has been struggling with for years.

And that is why Manalo said she reacted so strongly.

A Pest Hawaii Already Knows Too Well

Dukelow’s report placed the discovery in a larger context that makes the family’s concern easy to understand. The coconut rhinoceros beetle has been spreading in Hawaii for more than a decade, and the consequences have been serious.

As Dukelow explained, the beetles have established themselves across Oahu over the past 13 years and are now spreading to the Big Island. There have also been recent detections in East Kauai, while Maui County is still monitoring closely in an effort to keep the pest from gaining a stronger foothold there.

That spread matters because CRB is not just unpleasant to look at. The pest is deeply damaging to palm trees and can devastate landscapes over time. Manalo told Hawaii News Now she was panicking because she knows how destructive infestations can be and how badly they can damage trees across the islands.

That reaction did not sound exaggerated. If anything, it sounded like someone who understood the stakes. Invasive species in Hawaii are not abstract policy problems. They show up in backyards, farms, forests, and neighborhoods, and once they get established, they can be extremely hard to control.

So when Dukelow framed this not just as a gross discovery but as a warning to other customers, that felt like the right emphasis.

Lowe’s Says It Checked Other Bags

The store did respond, and Dukelow included that side of the story as well. Kalani Lagoc, identified as one of the Waipahu store managers, said the location receives a report of CRB in a bag of soil they have sold about every two months.

That is an eyebrow-raising detail all by itself. Even if those reports are infrequent compared to total sales volume, hearing that this is something that gets reported on a recurring basis suggests it is not a one-time freak event.

Lagoc told Dukelow that after Manalo reported her discovery, employees checked the other 30 or so bags from the same pallet for holes and did not find any. He also said workers opened six or seven bags from that group to inspect them and did not find any larvae inside.

He added that the store planned to do what it needed to do to make sure the next customer pulling a bag from that pallet would not face the same issue.

That is the sort of response most people would expect, but it still leaves uncomfortable questions hanging in the air. If the store could not find more larvae in other bags, that may suggest the infestation was isolated. But if the store gets a report like this every couple of months, then “isolated” starts sounding less reassuring than it otherwise might.

Why This Story Resonates Beyond One Backyard

What makes Dukelow’s report especially effective is that it never treats this as just a gross-out local oddity. It is certainly that, but it is also a small example of how invasive species can piggyback into ordinary life through products people buy for simple chores like gardening and landscaping.

That is what makes the story more unsettling than sensational. Wendy Manalo was not out in the woods turning over rotten logs. She was opening a fresh bag of commercial soil she had bought from a major home improvement store.

That is the kind of detail that sticks with people because it makes the threat feel less distant. It suggests that vigilance is not just for farmers, landscapers, or agriculture officials. It may also fall on ordinary customers who think they are bringing home a basic gardening supply and instead end up transporting a pest problem.

To be fair, no one in the report suggested the store intentionally sold contaminated product or ignored a known infestation in that particular bag. But it is also fair to say that stories like this tend to shake public confidence, especially in a place where invasive species have already caused enough damage to make everyone a little more alert than usual.

A Warning Others In Hawaii Will Probably Take Seriously

By the end of Dukelow’s report, one thing was clear: Manalo was not just grossed out. She wanted other people to pay attention. She reported the larvae to state agriculture officials, and she used her experience to urge others to check what they buy.

That is probably the most useful takeaway from the whole story. The image of more than 60 larvae coming out of a bag of soil is memorable, but the bigger point is practical. People in Hawaii are already being asked to stay watchful for invasive species, and this report is one more reminder that those pests do not always show up where you expect them.

It is hard to blame Wendy Manalo for being horrified. Most people would be. But in a state fighting to protect its trees, landscapes, and ecosystems from an aggressive invasive beetle, her reaction also carried something more important than disgust: urgency.

And after hearing Dukelow’s report, that urgency seems fully justified.