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.
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:
Thats what i never understood either…