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The main purpose of this study was to test the hypotheses that major changes in age structure occur in wild populations of the Mediterranean fruit fly (medfly) and that a substantial fraction of individuals survive to middle age and beyond (> 3–4 weeks). We thus brought reference life tables and deconvolution models to bear on medfly mortality data gathered from a 3‐year study of field‐captured individuals that were monitored in the laboratory. The average time‐to‐death of captured females differed between sampling dates by 23.9, 22.7, and 37.0 days in the 2003, 2004, and 2005 field seasons, respectively. These shifts in average times‐to‐death provided evidence of changes in population age structure. Estimates indicated that middle‐aged medflies (> 30 days) were common in the population. A surprise in the study was the extraordinary longevity observed in field‐captured medflies. For example, 19 captured …