Word: screwworms
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DIED. EDWARD KNIPLING, 90, U.S. government entomologist whose 1950s insect-eradication technique, X-ray sterilization of males to prevent offspring, saved U.S. livestock from the plague of the screwworm; in Arlington, Va. Developed with a colleague, the no-insecticide model has since been used successfully against many other insect pests...
...route to help dedicate a screwworm eradication plant in Mexico, Earl Butz took a plane to California just after the Republican National Convention in Kansas City. He could have flown either Continental or TWA, but his aide, Roger Knapp, chose TWA. In the first-class compartment, the Agriculture Secretary spied Singers Pat Boone and Sonny Bono, and John Dean, the former White House counsel who had blown the whistle on Richard Nixon and had just worked the convention as a writer for Rolling Stone. A gregarious man who likes to flaunt his snappy country-and often barnyard-sense of humor...
Hatched in open sores on cattle, their screw-shaped larvae can literally eat their way through a live steer. For years, they were a major scourge of the cattle country in the U.S. Southwest. It was not until the 1960s that screwworm flies were brought under control by a cunning form of biological warfare. Millions of flies, bred in a factory in Mission, Texas, were irradiated with sterilizing doses of gamma rays and released into the wild. When sterile males mated with normal females, which make only one sexual contact during their two or three weeks of life, the unions...
...last winter and moist conditions this summer have increased the birth rate of the fly; there are fewer ranch hands to check and treat cattle on the ranges; and a recent proliferation of Gulf Coast ear ticks has resulted in wounds on cattle that provide ideal hatching places for screwworm larvae. In addition, some scientists speculate that because the factory males are smaller and differently colored, the wild females may be finding them less attractive. In any case, future factory-bred males may be more formidable sexual competitors. The Texas factory and a large new breeding plant formally opened last...
STERILIZATION. Since the females of many insect species mate only once in a lifetime, bug birth rates can be reduced by tricking them into mating with males that have been sterilized by exposure to radiation. In the 1960s, sterile males were used to eradicate the resident screwworm fly population in Florida and large areas of the Southwest. In a somewhat similar program, Agriculture Department officials in California recently released more than 350 million sterile males and females in an apparently successful attempt to control an invasion of relatively small numbers of the Mediterranean fruit fly. The invaders, mating mostly with...