US Plans To Begin Breeding Billions Of Flies To Fight Pest. Here Is How It Will Work

The US government is preparing to breed billions of flies and dump them out of airplanes over Mexico and southern Texas to fight a flesh-eating maggot.

- Associated Press

That sounds like the plot of a horror movie, but it is part of the government's plans for protect-ing the US from a bug that could devastate its beef industry, decimate wildlife and even kill household pets. This weird science has worked well before.

"It's an exceptionally good technology," said Edwin Burgess, an assistant professor at the University of Florida who studies parasites in animals, particularly livestock. "It's an all-time great in terms of translating science to solve some kind of large problem."

The targeted pest is the flesh-eating larva of the New World Screwworm fly. The US Department of Agriculture plans to ramp up the breeding and distribution of adult male flies sterilizing them with radiation before releasing them so they can mate ineffectively with females and over time cause the population to die out.

It is more effective and environmentally friendly than spraying the pest into oblivion, and it is how the US and other nations north of Panama eradicated the same pest decades ago. Sterile flies from a factory in Panama kept the flies contained there for years, but the pest appeared in southern Mexico late last year.