The US government is preparing to breed billions of flies and is taking them out of the airplane on Mexico and Southern Texas to fight meat -eating magat.
It looks like a horror film plot, but it is part of Government plans to protect America From a bug that can destroy its beef industry, destroy wildlife and even kill domestic pets. This strange science has done a good job before.
“This is an exceptionally good technique,” Edwin Burges said, an assistant professor at the University of Florida, who study parasites in animals, especially livestock. “It is an all -time great in terms of translating science to solve some type of big problem.”
AP 
Targeted insect meat is the larvae New world screw fly. The US Department of Agriculture plans to ramp adult male flies to ramps breeding and distribution – sterilizing them with radiation before releasing them. They have sexual intercourse with women in the wild, and eggs laid by the female are not fertilized and do not hatch. There are less larvae, and over time, the population of the fly dies.
This is more effective and environmentally friendly than spraying insects in oblivion, and how the US and other countries in the north of Panama erased the same insect decades ago. Sterile flies kept flies there for years from a factory in Panama, but the insect appeared in southern Mexico later last year.
The USDA hopes that by July 2026, a new screw -fly factory is running up and running in Southern Mexico. It is planning to open a fly distribution center in southern Texas by the end of the year so that it can import and distribute flies from Panama if necessary.
According to the USDA’s animal and plant health inspection service, the parasite, the scientific name for the Kocliomia Hominivorax, is almost translated into the “Man-Eater”.
“When the NWS larvae (magots) bloom in the flesh of a living animal, they often damage the animal,” USDA They say. “NWS can infect people, pets, wildlife, sometimes in birds and rare cases.”
AP 
Danger for beef industry
Most fly larvae feed on dead meat, causing a serious threat to the new world screw fly and its old world counterparts in Asia and Africa – and for the American beef industry, a serious threat. Female lays her eggs in wounds and sometimes, highlight the mucus.
Michael Bailey, president of the American Veterinary Medicine Association, said, “A thousand pounds of bovine can die in two weeks.”
Veterinarians have effective treatment for infected animals, but an infection can still be unpleasant – and can cripple an animal with pain.
A retired Western Canasus rancher, Don Henman, remembered the infected cattle as a young man in his family farm.
“It was a bad smell,” he said. “Like rotting meat.”
Scientists plan to use fly biology against it
The new world screw fly is a tropical species, which is unable to escape the winter midwestern or the great planes, so it was a seasonal crisis. Nevertheless, the US and Mexico released more than 94 billion flies to erase the insect from 1962 to 1975, according to the USDA.
The numbers should be quite large that women in the wild cannot help, but hook with sterile men for sexual intercourse.
A biological feature gives fly fighters an important wing: women have sexual intercourse only once in their weeks.
Why does America want to breed more flies?
Concerned about the fly migration North, the US in May temporarily shut down its southern border for the import of living cattle, horses and bison and would not be at least completely open again by mid -September.
But female flies can place their eggs on any warm-wound animal, and it includes humans.
Decades ago, the US had fly factories in Florida and Texas, but closed and closed as the insect was erased.
The Panama fly factory can breed up to 117 million in a week, but the USDA wants the ability to have at least 400 million in a week. It plans to spend $ 8.5 million on the Texas site and plans to convert sterile fruit flies into one for flies for screws for a feature of $ 21 million to change a feature in southern Mexico.
Raising millions of flies
In a sense, it is relatively easy to lift a large colony of flies, said Cassandra Olds, an assistant professor of Antomology at Cassus State University.
But, he said, “You have got the female to indicate that she needs to lay his eggs, and then the larvae must have enough nutrients.”
Once larvae fed horse and honey and then according to USDA research, dried eggs and honey or jaggery were taken into a mixture. Later, the Panama Factory used a mixture that included egg powder and red blood cells and plasma from cattle.
In the wild, the larva is ready for equal to the cocoon phase of a butterfly, which leaves their hosts and grows to adulthood inside the ground, just below the surface and adulthood inside a protective cover, allowing them to meet a dark brown tick tack mint. In the Panama factory, workers leave them in a tray of sawdust.
Security is an issue. Sonja Swigar, an entomologist with the extension service of the University of Texas A&M, said any fertile adults placed to protect a fertile adults from protecting any fertile adults should be stopped.
Risk associated with leaving flies from an airplane
Leaving flies from air can be dangerous. Last month, an aircraft -free sterile flies crashed near the Mexico border with Guatemala, killing three people.
In the Test run in the 1950s, according to the USDA, scientists placed flies in a paper cup and then excluded the cups from the aircraft using special chutes. Later, he loaded them into boxes with a machine known as “whiz packer”.
The method is still very similar: light aircraft with flies boxes leave those boxes.
Burges called the development of sterile fly breeding and distribution in one of the “Crowning achievements” of USDA in the 1950s and 1960s.
Some agricultural officials now argued that new factories should not be closed after another successful fight.
Burges said, “We feel that we have complete control – and we have announced a victory and victory – we can always back down our ugly head.”
AP 
