Weird: US Government Dumping Billions of Flies to Combat Flesh-Eating Maggots

Sometimes a headline on a news item just makes you stop, take a second look, and feel your eyebrows toboggan off the top of your skull. This is one such item; it seems that the United States government is hatching a scheme to breed billions of flies and drop them out of airplanes over Mexico and southern Texas. Why? Biological warfare? No. Some new scheme to combat climate change? No. The goal behind the fly paratroopers is to eliminate nefarious flesh-eating maggots.

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Yes, really.

The U.S. 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.

That sounds like the plot of a horror movie, but it is part of the government’s plans for protecting the U.S. 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 interesting thing is that, yes, from a biology standpoint, this actually makes good sense. This is an act of biological warfare after all, but it’s against an insect pest, the larval form of the New World Screwworm Fly, which can do a lot of livestock damage in that part of the country. These screwworms burrow into warm-blooded animals and can cause serious damage not only to cattle and other large mammals but also to pets, birds, and, yes, people. 

But what about the flies? Will they settle in and start raising families? Someone thought of that possibility, and that turns out to be the key to the whole thing. You see, the paratrooper flies that are to be dropped are sterilized male New World Screwworm Flies.