Word: screwworms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1952-1952
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...Ridge National Laboratory last week, Entomologist R. C. Bushland of the U.S. Department of Agriculture was planning a dirty trick on an unpleasant insect: the screwworm fly of Texas and Florida. The female flies lay their eggs in open wounds (even scratches or tick bites) in the hides of cattle. From each clutch hatch about 200 maggots, which eat a hole in a cow as big as a lemon. Often other flies attack the same wound. Unless an outside agency (i.e., a cowpoke with anti-fly dressings) comes to the cow's rescue, she may be eaten alive...
...Screwworm damage costs $15 million year in Texas and about $10 million in Florida, but in spite of the harm they do, the flies are not very numerous. Even in the warmest parts of the country, comparatively few survive the winter. Bushland decided that if he could slow their reproduction he might reduce their population or even wipe them...
...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...