SciShow explains 'Why Planes Drop Millions of Flies on Panama Every Day'

I'm returning to SciShow for another story I tell my students, Why Planes Drop Millions of Flies on Panama Every Day.

Every day, airplanes fly over the Panama-Colombia border and drop millions of flies from the sky. It's part of an intense effort to control a deadly pest called screwworms, and believe it or not, it works.

Hosted by: Stefan Chin (he/him)

The tale of screwworm eradication from North America is one I tell my environmental science students every semester in a lecture about pest control in agriculture. I currently have a video about screwworms infesting Key deer, "an endangered subspecies of the white-tailed deer that lives only in the Florida Keys." That makes for an interesting connection between agriculture and wildlife, but it's tangential to the main story. I'm planning on replacing that video with this one, which is the main story. The only element missing from the version I tell already is the part about using Florida as proof of concept by eradicating the flies from the Sunshine State first. Instead, it's Curacao, which makes even more sense than Florida.

The video also introduces a new technology to control screwworms, gene drives. While that will be new to my environmental science students, I've been showing a video about the technique to my organismal biology students for years. I embedded the video in For World Mosquito Day, TED-Ed asks 'Ethical dilemma: Should we get rid of mosquitoes?' My readers who haven't seen it yet can watch it there. Welcome to blogging as professional development.

By the way, I was worried that DOGE would mess with this program. So far, it seems it hasn't, as "the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) thanked President Donald J. Trump and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for working swiftly to protect the U.S. cattle herd from the threat of New World screwworm." On the other hand, the USDA accidentally fired officials working on bird flu and is now trying to rehire them, thanks to DOGE. Oops. Not the best time to make that mistake!

Stay tuned for more posts I can share next month, as the blog made its page view goals for February on the evening of the 16th. Evergreen entries until the 28th!