Strain of Sterile Flies Produced to Combat NWS

An update on the fight against New World Screwworm. Research entomologist Alex Arp describes the new NovoFly, a new strand of sterile flies.

“We’ll mass produce a lot of screwworm flies, sterilize them with gamma radiation, and then release them over a large area. And continuously over time, this will kill off the population. Only the male flies are actually contributing to that population suppression. But historically, with New World Screwworm SIT, we’ve released males and females,” explained Arp.

“So a lot of the resources that go into the sterile insect production are kind of wasted, producing these female flies that don’t help us much. To develop a strain that we call NovoFly that kills the females as embryos. And this is a selective system, so we can turn it on and off,” Arp added.

Arp continued by saying, “So we can maintain our colony with males and females to produce male-only flies, and then another generation. On top of that, when we’re sterilizing these screwworm flies for SIT, the female flies need a really high sterilization dose, about twice what a male needs to be sterilized. So right now, all the males we’re producing are getting sterilized at this really high female dose, and it’s reducing their health a little bit in the field and reducing their capabilities for mating females.”

“So with NovoFly, since there’s not any females going through the radiation system, we can give an appropriate dose to the males, and we’ll get a healthier male out into the field that’s going to perform a lot better for us. So, there’s some pretty big advantages with NovoFly that are really going to help advance SIT without really increasing any production infrastructure,” said Arp.

Audio Reporting by Elizabeth Sanders for Southeast AgNet.