Right now, 100 million radiation-blasted flesh-eating flies are raining down over the jungles of Panama to commit a genocide that can never end.
Their tiny bodies are rebuilding a wall of flesh that protects an entire continent.
This is one of humanity's most successful wars, going on for over 50 years now fought from Central America to the deserts of Libya.
Okay, so what's going on?
The unbeatable flesh-eating fly.
We need to talk about one of the most terrifying parasites on Earth for a moment.
Don't worry, we won't make it too gross.
If you want to skip this part, jump to the next chapter.
Cochlea maya hominivorax, which literally means the man-eater.
The New World screwworm fly at home in the Americas.
Each of these metallic blue-green flies with bright red eyes that exist in nature is here because it's feasted on the flesh of a warm-blooded animal.
Cochlea Maya can detect wounds and smell blood across vast distances.
If a human, a deer or a squirrel has the tiniest scratch, female screwworm flies will try to lay eggs in the wound.
When they hatch, the worms start eating healthy flesh with sharp mandibles, causing horrible wounds, attracting even more flies.
In serious cases, the animal will die or at least be severely weakened.
Cochlea Maya doesn't add anything positive to the world and is a natural enemy of ours.
For most of history, this parasite was simply a horrifying fact of life in the Americas.
And then we accidentally created a paradise for them.
As farmers introduced millions and millions of cows to the vast expanses of the southern US, screwworms became a catastrophic problem and the source of endless suffering for our defenseless cattle.
One outbreak might wipe out herds and lead to cruel lingering deaths for countless animals in the wild.
Traditional pesticides were useless against Cochlea Maya, because you couldn't poison something that lived inside a living animal's flesh.
You couldn't prevent animals from getting injured or flies from finding wounds.
The situation seemed hopeless and Cochlea Maya was winning.
Ranchers had to spend countless hours examining their herds, treating wounds, trying to protect newborns, watching helplessly as their animals suffered.
And then two scientists in the 1950s had an idea that was too wild to be taken seriously at first.
What if we kind of nuke the screwworms?
Radioactive Parasite Factories Screwworm flies have a major weakness.
Female Cochlea Maya can lay up to 400 eggs multiple times.
But they only mate a single time before they die at the ripe old age of three weeks.
So what if we could somehow disrupt the mating process?
What if we could flood the environment with sterile male flies?
The females would waste their one and only chance at reproduction on males that couldn't produce offspring.
An entire species could theoretically mate itself out of existence.
But how do you sterilize millions of flies without killing them or making them too weak to compete for mates?
Well, it turned out the timing to do this was kind of perfect.
Scientists studying the effects of radiation had discovered that specific doses could damage reproductive cells while leaving the rest of an organism intact.
So all we needed to do was figure out how high this dose was for Cochlea.
Maya breed millions of flies, irradiate them and release them over thousands of square kilometers.
Imagine explaining this idea to someone in 1950.
Imagine the scale of the damage and the suffering that Cochlea Maya caused for people to say okay sure, let's try this, why not?
To prove this could work, scientists built a screw worm paradise in Florida and shipped millions of flies to the remote island of Curacao.
Long trays were filled with ground beef and horse meat, animal blood, milk, and eggs.
Thousands were bred, irradiated, and released into the wild in regular intervals.
As the weeks and months passed, more and more of the Cochlea Maya on the island were infertile and mated with regular ones.
First slowly, and then suddenly, they were no more.
Completely eradicated.
It was time to think much bigger.
Over the next few decades.
A war was declared and professional worm factories established to breed them by the billions.
A single plant in Texas alone needed 70 tons of meat and 12000 gallons of blood to breed 150 million flies per week.
The disgusting mix had to be kept warm because they had to believe they were inside a living animal.
This lovely process made the insects smell so bad that airlines initially refused to transport them.
Their transport boxes had to be sprayed with cologne just to get them on planes.
Bit by bit, in a slow-moving wave of biological warfare, the program eradicated screwworms.
First from Florida, then across Texas, through Mexico and into Central America.
Every step required billions of sterile flies, massive coordination and unwavering dedication from thousands of workers.
It was an incredible victory of humanity over the horrors of nature.
In 1988, the war suddenly became global and for the first time ever, screwworms escaped to Africa.
The stakes were astronomical.
If not stopped immediately, flesh-eating Cochlea Maya could move down the Nile Valley around the North African coast and conquer regions where medical care was scarce or non-existent.
The potential suffering was incalculable.
To stop this invasion, a Herculean operation was triggered immediately.
Hundreds of millions of sterile flies were flown in.
Ground teams inspected millions of animals for wounds.
Communication campaigns explained to locals why planes were dropping boxes full of millions of flesh-eating American flies.
But it worked.
In just four months, the invasion was stopped.
But Cochlea Maya still held a firm grip over the Amazon rainforest and much of South America.
An area too large, politically complicated and expensive to expand the war further.
So a deal was made with Panama, the narrowest part of the continent.
The US and Mexico would pay for a wall of flesh in the small country.
It would prevent any screwworms from reaching the north ever again.
Today, deep in Panama, a nuclear worm factory runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, producing an endless stream of sterile flies.
The technology has come a long way from the early days.
Instead of ground meat, a brown protein sludge made from powder blood, milk and eggs is piped into trays stacked in rooms kept at exactly the same temperature as living tissue.
Thousands of flies are then carefully irradiated with precise doses of radiation, creating cochlea meyer that act normal but are dead inside.
Each week 100 million flies are loaded into rotating dispersal machines to be released mid-flight in a finely tuned balance of drop rate, speed and altitude.
The flight paths are separated by precisely 16 kilometers, in a choreographed aerial ballet, creating an invisible wall of sterile flies.
Surveillance teams cover some of the most remote and challenging terrain to check animals for injuries and monitor for any sign of screwworm activity.
Unfortunately, right now the wall is failing and the war against Cochlea Maya is far from over.
In 2016, Cochlea Maya somehow made their way back to the Florida Keys, turning the Paradise Islands into a nightmare.
Key deer were suddenly walking around with gaping wounds.
Millions of sterile flies were rushed in from Panama, creating a front around the outbreak and beginning the eradication again.
Within months, the invasion was at least contained.
And in late 2023, the wall in Panama failed, and Cochlea Maya struck back immediately.
Like a parasitic firestorm on speed, it spread again all over Panama and Costa Rica, burning through Central America and even reaching Mexico.
The worm factory now produces sterile worms at maximum capacity.
It's a real biological emergency, and it's not clear when it will be over.
One day, we might be able to win the war against this horrible monster.
We did so before, and other parasites have been eradicated from much of the world, or even entirely so.
If you find yourself in central america and see a low-flying plane overhead, maybe you're witnessing another day in one of humanity's most unusual wars, a war we can never stop fighting and can't afford to lose.
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