Topeka, Kan.-The United States government is preparing to raise billions of flies and leave them from airplanes over Mexico and southern Texas to fight a worm that eats meat.
That sounds like the plot of a horror film, but it is part of the government’s plans to protect the United States from an error that could devastate its beef industry, decimize wildlife and even kill domestic pets. This strange science has worked well before.
“It is an exceptionally good technology,” said Edwin Burgess, an assistant professor at the University of Florida who studies parasites in animals, particularly cattle. “It is great all time in terms of translation of science to solve some kind of great problem.”
The target plague is the eating meat of the New World screw worm meat. The United States Department of Agriculture plans to increase the reproduction and distribution of adult male flies, sterilizing them with radiation before releasing them. They mate with females in nature, and the eggs put by the female are not fertilized and do not hatch. There are fewer larvae, and over time, the population of flies dies.
It is more effective and ecological than to spray the plague in oblivion, and it is how the United States and other nations north of Panama eradicated the same pests decades ago. The sterile flies of a factory in Panama maintained the flies contained there for years, but the plague appeared in southern Mexico at the end of last year.
The USDA hopes that a new screw screw flies factory will be in operation in southern Mexico in July 2026. It plans to open a flies distribution center in southern Texas by the end of the year so that it can import and distribute flies from Panama if necessary.
Fly feeds on living meat
Most flies feed on dead meat, which makes the new world fly with screw flyers and its old world counterpart in Asia and Africa Autonteros, and for the American meat industry, a serious threat. The females place their eggs in wounds and, sometimes, the mucus exposed.
“A thousand pound bovine may be dead of this in two weeks,” said Michael Bailey, elected president of the American Veterinary Medicine Association.
Veterinarians have effective treatments for infested animals, but an infestation can still be unpleasant, and paralyze an animal with pain.
Don Hineman, a retired rancher from Kansas, recalled infected cattle when he was young on his family’s farm.
“It smelled unpleasant,” he said. “Like rotten meat.”
How scientists will use the biology of the fly against it
New World World Tornworm’s fly is a tropical species, unable to survive winters from the west or in the Great Plains, so it was a seasonal scourge. Even so, the United States and Mexico raised and launched more than 94 billion sterile flies from 1962 to 1975 to eradicate the plague, according to the USDA.
The numbers must be large enough for females in nature, they cannot avoid connecting with sterile males for mating.
A biological feature offers flies combatants a crucial wing: females look only at their lives in one week.
Why the United States wants to raise more flies
To the alarm on the migration of the fly, North, the United States temporarily closed its southern border in May to imports of living cattle, horses and bison and will not open again until mid -September.
But female flies can place their eggs in wounds in any hot blood animal, and that includes humans.
Decades ago, the United States had flies in Florida and Texas, but they closed when the plague was eradicated.
The Panama flies can raise up to 117 million per week, but the USDA wants the ability to reproduce at least 400 million per week. Plan to spend $ 8.5 million on the Texas site and $ 21 million to convert an installation in southern Mexico to raise sterile flies in one for screw worms.
How to raise hundreds of millions of flies
In a sense, raising a large colony of flies is relatively easy, said Cassandra Olds, an assistant professor of entomology at Kansas State University.
But, he added, “you must give the female the signals she needs to put her eggs, and then the larvae have to have enough nutrients.”
Flies once fed with larvae, horse and honey meat and then moved to a mixture of dry eggs and honey or molasses, according to the previous investigation of the USDA. Later, the Panama factory used a mixture that included egg powder and red blood cells and cattle plasma.
In nature, the larvae ready for the equivalent of the cocoon scenario of a butterfly drop their guests and to the ground, burrow just below the surface and grow up to adulthood inside a protective housing that resembles a dark brown mint tac tic. In the Panama factory, workers leave them in sawdust trays.
Security is a problem. Sonja Swiger, entomologist of the Extension Service of the University of Texas A&M, said that a reproduction installation should prevent any fertile adult to be maintained to raise existers escape.
How to release a plane flies
Arriving air flies can be dangerous. Last month, a plane that releases sterile flies crashed near the border of Mexico with Guatemala, killing three people.
In the tests in the 1950s, according to the USDA, the scientists placed the flies in paper vessels and then dropped the cups of the airplanes using special chutas. Later, they loaded them in boxes with a machine known as a “genius packer.”
The method remains the same: the light planes with flies of flies that drop those boxes.
Burges called the development of the breeding and distribution of sterile flies in the 1950s and 1960s, one of the “coronation achievements” of the USDA.
Some agriculture officials now argue that new factories should not be closed after another successful fight.
“Something that we believe we have complete control, and we have declared a triumph and a victory over, you can always raise your ugly head,” Burgess said.
