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.
If the male is sterile, how does the female know that she has “mated”?
You think the female flies know if their eggs have been fertilized? They just know they mated and go on their way.
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.