fun fact there's a roughly 86% chance that today the day you're watching this the United States Air dropped millions of live flies over the Panama Columbia border and no it wasn't one of our classic pranks like when we dropped that big pie on B no this is a part of a decades long collaboration that keeps nearly the entire North American continent safe from and bear with me here the exact species of fly were dropping but this massive intricate and deeply weird quote idiotic insect sex scheme is actually working but how what on a day-to-day basis does it take to keep flying flesh eating freaks out of this much space the short answer a 24/7 bug Factory planes boats trucks loads of inspectors x-rays cow blood wound paint and this is true doughnut holes also grit and gumption and the spirit of a champion but as for the long answer it starts with knowing our enemy the new world screwworm and I know neither you nor I want to look at them so here's the plan one we're putting in a progress bar two I've encouraged my editors to make this as metaphor as possible three Dancing Clown so here we go first they're not nice guys if they were still bugging around the us today they'd be costing Farmers somewhere in the ballpark of a billion dollars in dead livestock a year and it's not just cattle at risk these things can infect even kill any living warm-blooded mammal yes including people yes including your dog yes including gritty these bad boys are about twice the size of a normal house fly and a thousand times as rude their 10 to 30-day lifespan begins when females lay their eggs hundreds at a time in a live animal's open wound tick bites scratches fresh belly buttons they hatch as worms and hook into the animal's flesh which they then eat which is extremely painful and often deadly for the host animal once the wormies are fattened up they drop to the ground pupate emerge as flies and the cycle repeats okay we're done this is Edward F Kipling he grew up dealing with screwworms on his family's farm and went on to spend most of his career researching them and here was his big finding female screw worms only mate once in their lives which means that if you can mess that up they destroy themselves in a couple generations and after many years and many Thursday afternoon trips to the military hospital with his buddy Raymond to blast worm larvey with x-rays Kipling learned that you can sterilize a fly if you X-ray it 5. 5 to 5. 7 days into its pupil stage that Discovery is the backbone of what I'm calling the Great American worm wall you can't see it from space or from the ground it's invisible but it's nevertheless an extremely tight border here's how it works here in pakora Panama this Factory employs 115 people to cook up and CH out sterile screw worms 20 million of them a week the young flies are raised in a series of humidity and temperature control rooms that mimic the warm and inviting atmosphere of an open wound they eat a nasty Brown goop made of reconstituted milk egg and powdered cow's blood thickened with some cellulose which is actually good to know because I have all this powdered cows blood in my cabinet which I bought for like one recipe and now I have all this left over and nothing to use it for so annoying once the worms are old enough they each get hit with radioactive Cobalt 60 and it's off to the airport the sterilized pupe arrive in coolers then get sorted into trays and once they grow into adult flies they go to a cold room where they get nice and sleepy before what is sure to be one of the craziest possible days any creature on this planet can have but now the fun part airplanes Copeg The Joint us Panama commission that runs this whole thing and also a heavy lifting acronym uses retired military turbo prop planes that have been specially retrofitted to drop flies through the the floor of the plane at an adjustable rate Once Upon a Time technicians just threw cardboard boxes out but those didn't always open on impact which defeated the whole purpose over the course of a 4-Hour flight the plane will drop 2.
1 million flies over this region of Panama flies that will wake up as they hurdle down to earth to eradicate their own species or as I like to put it the screw worms screw worms to screw screwworms now the math whizzes among you may have worked out that 2. 1 million flies over six weekly flights doesn't add up to the 20 million the factory produces week but there's plenty of use for the leftovers see the new world screw worm hasn't actually been eradicated from all of North America Cuba for example still has them and they're still rampant in South America so all those excess worms fight outbreaks when they happen Aruba had ones in 2004 and 2011 and when they popped up in the Florida Keys in 2016 the USDA rocked up with 190 million flies released three generations and re eradicated them in a matter of months also part of that effort they had 200 people trolling around the keys feeding and infected deer anti-parasite Med stuffed in dnut holes which implies the existence of a federal doughnut budget or FDB which is exciting to me but this also brings up another part of the worm wall the ground game yes the Its Raining Men Strat does a lot but Copeg also monitors animals across the Darion ensuring fertile screwworms that slip through the cracks don't make it far they work from 13 field posts traveling on boat horse and motorcycle to monitor atrisk Farms every Farm gets an inspection either monthly four monthly or annually depending how Copeg has assessed their risk and cattle leaving the Daran all get inspected and any worms they have get coated in anti-parasite paint that would kill any screw worms that might be in there in all the worm wall costs about $15 million a year more money than the worm wall in my apartment cost but an incredible deal for the money and lives it saves but the project didn't come out of the gates this well oiled or this cheap see after scientists proved the sterile insect technique would work on screw rooms in CAU the USDA took up the project here east of the Mississippi and 1957 2 years later screwworms were gone from the southeast and the effort moved West we declared ourselves screwworm free by 1966 and had a sterile fly Factory up and running in Texas but maintaining the Border in the west proved challenging and expensive maybe because while the Eastern range of the fly was bordered by water the Western Range was bordered by well more range with that in mind in 1972 the US struck up a deal with Mexico instead of having to maintain a 2,000m great American worm wall at the US Mexico border how about about we eradicate all the way down to here the ismus of tantek which is only 120 M across the two countries agreed to split the bill based on the value of the livestock it would save in each Place Mexico paid 20% while the US paid 80% and by 1982 the Texas worm Factory was closed and replaced by one in TLA Mexico and Mexico declared Sonora and Baja California Norte worm free but why stop there if you're going to move the worm border here why not move it here and so began the not always smooth process of TR to work in agreement with every individual country in Central America having them work alongside the US with whom they didn't all have um awesome relationships at the time to go screwworm free and it worked from 1987 to 2006 they eradicated the screwworm from all these places with the Central American country splitting costs with the us at a ratio of 15 to 85 and the US and Panama ending up with shared responsibility for Staffing the border and Colombia still having to give monthly permission to copc to drop a bunch of screwworms in the part of the buffer zone They control all to say the Great American worm wall is a pretty amazing thing it's effective it saves tons of lives and money and it does its job so well that most of us don't even know it's there put another way it's a great example of what's possible when you combine passionate if slightly wacky scientists with government agencies that are actually willing to foot the bill for weird expensive but ultimately great solutions to big problems too bad that lesson isn't applicable literally anywhere else oh well okay so remember earlier when I said I had a bunch of powdered blood in my kitchen that was a lot what I actually have in my kitchen is delicious pre-made meals from this video sponsor factor factor is a service that delivers anywhere from 4 to 18 meals per week right to your doorstep they're each ready to eat in just minutes and really have my back in weeks that are just too busy for cooking but with Factor no matter what type of week I'm having I know I'll be eating well and not blowing all my money on takeout or settling for powdered blood sludge again and you know you can trust Factor because they're owned by hellofresh another sponsor of mine whose service I use in love so if you want to eat well at home while putting in functionally zero effort have I got a deal for you head to factor75.
