Got a notice today from the Texas & Southwestern Cattle Raisers Assn. to be on the lookout for the screwworm. It's now in Mexico and headed north. They were eradicacated in the US in 1966. Those of you who were kids or born about that time or later, have no idea just how destructive they are. Any warm blooded mammal is fair game. I fully remember having to doctor a new born calf or kids navel to keep the flys from blowing it. Once they did and the eggs hatched, the larve would start eating and unless you cought it in time, the animal would die. When you have several thousand head of goats, it is dang near impossible to keep up with them. I mention this because of the deer population here in the brush country. If a deer gets so much as a scratch that bleeds, it's fair game for the blowflies. We lost a LOT of deer to the screw worms. Once the flys were gone, through time, our deer population came back.

During that time, I had evelopes and vials with alcohol in them. If we suspected a case or knew it was a real case, we would put some screwworm larve in the vial and send it down to Mission. In a day or two, a plane would drop boxes of steril flys. For years I would find the boxes all over the ranch. I kept a few but they are gone now.

I mention this because a lot of y'all are out in the brush hunting. If you come across an animal that has screwworms please let the authorities know.

Frio

Do you have a copy of the notice?

This is a serious issue. This would be 100x’s worse than CWD

It has been in the news.
https://www.aphis.usda.gov/news/age...ted-states-new-world-screwworm-detection

No, it would not be 100x's worse than CWD. It would not be great, but keep in mind this has never gone away in the Caribbean, South America, the Med, and Africa. As noted, we had it here in the southern US until the 1960s.

My FIL , who is almost 90, told us stories about how bad the screw-worms were just like Frio
has mentioned. He said that once they had eradicated them the deer population exploded.
I hope this does not get bad.

Dad always said it was bad… but if 1960 USA beat it I’m not overly concerned. A few less deer would probably be an improvement to a lot of areas although I’d rather they were shot and made into tasty treats.

Tell me about how it affects the whitetail deer in the Caribbean, South America and Africa?

Go look at deer population numbers here in the prior to the eradication in the 60’s

It would absolutely be devastating to the whitetail populations in Texas

This, screwworms where cause of most of the deer restocking in Texas

The last US infestation was in 2016 and it took a huge toll on Florida keys deer in the refuge

I’d say it’s 5000x worse than CWD. As CWD infected deer normally die from natural causes well before the disease manifests. DNS needs to research life expectancy of screwworms infected animal

Sorry to have been late in my response but when you own & operate ranches there are always a lot of things to do. The link posted above is basically what the TSCRA note said. You hit the nail on the head txtrophy85 when you said it could be 100x's worse than CWD. One has to think outside the box. CWD is the latest thing to affect deer. That can have a financial impact but nothing like screw worms and the impact they can have from an economic standpoint alone.
I will be 80 in the blink of an eye. I lived through the days and years of screwworms. I have personally seen the damage they can do when left unchecked. Younger folks and city folks generally don't have a clue. I can only hope and pray that we don't face that issue again.

Frio

We had quite a few sheep and goats die from them. You would find the dead ones in old sheds or places where it was kind of dark. The cattle you could usually catch and spray the wounds.

Life expectancy as a general rule is 1-2 weeks. A lot depends on where the wound is located. That is also dependant on weather. The hotter it is the shorter their life is left unchecked.

Frio

And not just deer. It would raise hell with sheep and goats, which is still a very large $ industry in Texas.

Frio, were you raised in Frio County near Frio Town? If so, do you remember the Saunders who ranched there and raised Polled Herefords?
I remember the screw worm days and how much better the cowboys were back then. We finally wised up and began catching newborns after dark with spotlights. I hope we don't see those days again.
Adios,
Gary

Back in the 80's, Starr County had a problem with them. USDA would drop cardboard boxes of sterile flies from an old DC-3. You'd find the empty, white, cardboard boxes, about two inches high, and about a foot wide, all over the place. You couldn't sit and monitor traffic with your windows down with out having a mini swarm of the darn things in your patrol truck.

Go back and look at the deer #s prior to the eradication in the 60s? Surely you could direct me to this source for Texas. Everything else I find shows a steady increase in the deer population from the 1930s into the 2000s. The 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s were really just recovery from years of no regulation and the Great Depression. So there were a lot more deer in the 60s than the 50s, more in the 50s than the 40s, and more in the 40s than the 30s.

Understand that the deer population had been living with the naturally occurring screwworm population since what, the last ice age - so thousands of years. It wasn't the screwworm killing off the deer population, not like people were, LOL.

What would dropping boxes of sterile flies do to mitigate non-sterile flies from moving in? Not sure I’m following

At Mission, they had the faclity that raised & nuked the flies which made them sterile. Whan released, they bred with the regular non sterile flies thus ending the cycle.

Frio

Not far from Frio Town. I vagely remember some Polled Herefords. However I didn't pay to much attention to them cause all of our cattle had a hump or were black with a hump. They work better in the brush country.