Word: screwworms
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Worst plague of Florida cattle is a large bluish fly called the screwworm. The adult female lays eggs on wounds or scratches! and the eggs hatch into maggots that literally eat the victim alive. Screwworm maggots can kill a full-grown steer in less than ten days. But last week, with the enthusiastic approval of cattlemen, planes were scattering millions of live screwworm flies over Florida rangelands...
Sweating in the summer heat, the candidates whooped through receptions, rallies, teachers' meetings, radio and TV stations, livestock markets, transit garages, factory shift changes, military bases, even (for Holland) a screwworm-eradication plant. According to Pepper, Democrat Holland, 66, was a "Rip van Winkle" who "is asleep most of the time and looks backward when he is awake." According to Holland, Pepper, 57, was a "radical, Communist sympathizer, socialist-trend thinker, Red, ultraliberal." On one big campaign issue, integration, there was no issue: Spessard Holland is an avowed segregationist; Claude Pepper noisily declaimed that he, too, opposes the Supreme...
...Great Screwworm Plot...
Your March 10 account of Entomologist R. C. Bushland's method of reducing the population of screwworm flies [by breeding sterile males] reminds me of the conceit that...
...cattle: they can lay no normal eggs. The males, sterile but still ambitious, will scour the country for fertile wild mates. But the females that they win will never lay fertile eggs. Bushland believes that "extensive use of this method will have a profoundly depressing effect on the screwworm fly population...