by Topeka, Kan. (AP)-The US government is preparing to breed billions of flies and throw them from airplanes via Mexico and South Texas to fight a carnivting maggot.
That sounds like the act of a horror film, but it is part of the government’s plans to protect the United States from a mistake that could kill its beef industry, the decimation of wild animals and even the pets of the household. This strange science has already worked well.
“It is an exceptionally good technology,” said Edwin Burgess, assistant professor at the University of Florida, who studies parasites in animals, especially in animals. “It is a great great doctor to translate science to solve a big problem.”
The targeted pest is the carnivorous larva of the new globe worm fly. The US Agriculture Ministry plans to improve the breeding and distribution of adult male flies – they sterilize them with radiation before they release them – so that they are ineffective with women and over time the population die out.
It is more effective and environmentally friendly than spraying the pest, and so the United States and other nations north of Panama eradicated the same pest decades ago. Sterile flies from a factory in Panama kept the flies there for years, but the pest performed in southern Mexico at the end of last year.
The USDA assumes that a new screw worm fly factory will be in operation in South Mexico by July 2026. It is planned to open a fly distribution center in South Texas by the end of the year so that it can import and distribute fly from Panama if necessary.
Fly feeds on living meat
Most fly larvae feed on the dead meat, which means that the new world screwdriver fly and its counterpart in the Old World in Asia and Africa – and for the American beef industries – a serious threat. Females lay their eggs in wounds and sometimes exposed mucus.
“In two weeks, it can be a thousand pounds,” said Michael Bailey, President of the American Veterinary Medicine Association.
Veterinarians have effective treatments for infected animals, but infestation can still be uncomfortable – and an animal paralyzed with pain.
Don Hineman, a retired Western Kansa Rancher, remembered infected cattle as a teenager on the farm of his family.
“It smelled bad,” he said. “Like rotting meat.”
How scientists will use the biology of the fly, on the other hand
The New World Screwworm Fly is a tropical way that cannot survive the middle west or the winter of midwestern or the large levels. So it was a seasonal scourge. Nevertheless, from 1962 to 1975, more than 94 billion sterile breeded to exterminate the pest, said the USDA.
The numbers have to be big enough that women in the wild is no different from meeting sterile men to mate.
A biological feature gives the fly fighter a decisive wing: the females only fit together in their weekly adult life.
Why the United States wants to breed more flies
Alarmed by the migration of the fly north, the United States in May closed its southern border for imports of living cattle, horses and bison temporarily and it will not be completely opened again until mid -September.
But female flying can lay their eggs in every warm -blooded animal in wounds, and that also includes people.
Decades ago, the United States had fly factories in Florida and Texas, but they closed when the pest was eradicated.
The Panama Fly Factory can breed up to 117 million a week, but the USDA wants the ability to breed at least 400 million a week. It is planned to spend 8.5 million US dollars for the location in Texas and 21 million US dollars in order to convert a South Mexico facility for breeding sterile fruit flies into a screwdriver flying.
How to raise hundreds of millions of flying
In a way, the upbringing of a large colony of flies is relatively simple, said Cassandra Olds, assistant professor of entomology at Kansas State University.
But she added: “You have to give the females the information she needs to lay her eggs, and then the larvae must have enough nutrients.”
Flying factories that once fed meat and honey, and, according to previous USDA research, moved into a mixture of dried eggs and either honey or molasses. The Panama factory later used a mixture that included egg powder and red blood cells and plasma of cattle.
In the wild, the larvae, which are prepared for the equivalent of the coconut stage of a butterfly, fall on the floor, grall directly below the surface and grow in a protective housing, which resembled a dark brown TIC -Tac coin until adulthood. In the Panama factory, the workers fall into sawdust.
Security is a problem. Sonja Swiger, an entomologist of the extension service of the Texas A&M University, said that a breeding system must prevent fruitful adults from escaping for breeding stocks.
How to let fly from a plane fall
Flying from the air can be dangerous. Last month, an airplane that supported sterile flies, near the Mexican border with Guatemala, plunged and killed three people.
In the test runs in the 1950s, scientists put the flies in paper cups, according to the USDA and then dropped the cups with special slides from aircraft. Later they loaded them in boxes with a machine known as “Whiz Packer”.
The method is still similar: light planes with fly boxes fall.
Burgess described the development of sterile fly breeding and distribution in the 1950s and 1960s one of the “coronation success of the USDA”.
Some agricultural officers now argue that new factories should not be closed after a further successful fight.
“Something we believe that we have complete control – and we have explained a triumph and a victory – can keep your ugly head up again and again,” said Burgess.
