The U.S. government on Wednesday released a five-prong policy initiative to stop the spread of New World screwworms in live cattle and other animal imports, including its plan to build an $8.5 million insect dispersal facility in Texas.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said her department plans to open what amounts to a fly factory by the end of the year. The facility will breed millions of sterile New World screwworm (NWS) flies at Moore Air Base, according to the initiative. The male flies will then be released into the wild to mate with females and prevent them from laying eggs in wounds that become flesh-eating larvae.
It would be only the second facility for breeding such flies in the Western Hemisphere, joining one in Panama that had largely kept the flies from migrating further north until last year.
The wounds from this are absolutely heinous and often fatal. Any relaxation of their containment is a huge unforced error.
The one in Panama actually makes sense because it is near the rainforest and acting as a buffer against them. These facilities only work if they are near the flies, you can’t use sterilized flies unless there is a population of flies to use them on.
When you put that together this almost looks like they are signaling plans to abandon support for the Panama facility and allow them to spread through all of South America up into Mexico.
It’s already in Mexico. Im not an expert, but I’d assume it will have moved even further north by the time they get this factory up and running.
The New World Screwworm has been making its way further north through the Americas, Texas officials said, and the fly’s appearance in southern Mexico has worried agriculture and cattle industry officials and veterinarians’ groups.
They are also building one in southern Mexico, according to the article.
Didn’t DOGE already cut support for the Panama facility? Something along those lines was in the news a couple months ago
Id be surprised if they abandon the Panama facility. Kurtzegat did a video about this very subject. Basically abandoning that facility will cause catastrophy all across the southern US continent and US itself.
Which means its a viable target for Trump to destabilize
its the same way with the mosquitos, if you dont continually suppress the mosquitoes they will rebound very quickly, might be harder with mosquitos because theres more than 1 species that can spread different disease. mosquitos also adapt very quickly.
America first and fuck everyone else
Oh shit, that’s exactly what they’re going to do. Shit.
Socialism to the rescue!
What prevents the female from subsequently mating with a non sterile male? Are they monogamous (lol)? Do they die in the mating process?
I wasn’t alive for the screw worms but I heard a lot of stories from my Grandmother who was a Texas cattle ranchers wife in the thick of it.
The objective is to overwhelm the population with sterile males. The female only mates once, so if you drop 50 sterile males to every 1 fertile male, the female will pick a sterile male.
They started dropping them in Florida in 1951 and were eradicated from the US by 1966. They had them pushed to the Darién Gap by the late 90s, and from 2000 until COVID, they were dropping 20 million sterile males a week, keeping them there.
If the male is sterile, how does the female know that she has “mated”?
Because she got the D. She doesn’t know he’s shooting blanks.
Also “sterile” doesn’t mean “no fertilization”. I think the way they do it for mosquitoes is that the males fertilize the females, but the offspring are unable to develop and hatch. To propagate the males in captivity, they modified critical genes to require specific laboratory conditions to activate. In the wild those genes can no longer function and the eggs don’t hatch.
You think the female flies know if their eggs have been fertilized? They just know they mated and go on their way.
Flies live quite short lives. They usually mate once and then spend the rest of their lives looking for places to lay their eggs.
From Wikipedia:
The entire life cycle is around 20 days. A female can lay up to 3,000 eggs and fly up to 200 km (120 mi) during her life. Males, on the other hand, mate up to ten times. They behave relatively isolated and hide in vegetation until they spot a female. Mating occurs on vegetation. Females copulate only once and retain the male’s sperm for life, which has been exploited in eradication programs using the sterile insect technique.
Thats what i never understood either…
