[goda90]

I wonder if anyone ever did the math on whether trying to maintain a barrier at the Darian Gap with occasional failures was really a better financial choice than teaming up with South American countries to drive screwworms to extinction.

[AlotOfReading]

Yes, they did because various countries have talked to the US about expanding it. The problem is that South America is an enormous place, whereas Panama is a narrow isthmus. It could have been done with some amount of money, but that opportunity ended in 2010 at the latest.

[moffkalast]

In the end though, history will see it as a half measure where they really shouldn't have half assed it. It only took one moron to defund the project and all of it will come streaming back.

[warumdarum]

This is a generalizeable problem though, all these conservation efforts, nuclear powerplants etc rely on thr base assumption of a working society there. To really extinct something like the screwworm you need to make it a religous praxis of a cultural orgsnization that persist even when society breaks down.

[moffkalast]

No that's the whole point of driving something to extinction, you don't have to be vigilant anymore once it's done. Smallpox, the Tasmanian tiger.

[cogman10]

[deleted for being misinformation]

[aeontech]

Hmm, that seems to contradict the article directly - insecticides were used to try to battle screwworm initially and were not really effective - the solution was using sterile male flies to stop reproduction - which would work in South America just as well as it did in North (with sufficient scale)

[cogman10]

You and the article are correct so I erased my comment.

I found and read through some of the reports of the time to try and prove myself correct. I'm wrong.

https://www.nal.usda.gov/exhibits/speccoll/exhibits/show/sto...

[praptak]

Releasing the steriles blindly is not enough, you gotta monitor the pest too. This is prohibitively expensive in rainforests and other areas with poor infrastructure.

Okay, maybe you could release the flies in large enough numbers not to need monitoring but I guess it would also be prohibitively expensive.

[smegger001]

we could possibly use a gene drive to make males that would only produce male descendants in a handful of generation they would go extinct.

[nine_k]

It sort of worked with malaria mosquitoes.

[consensus1]

I think the issue is that you would have to push the barrier across the entire South American continent, which is twice the distance of the US-Mexico border and also crosses the Amazon where there is basically no infrastructure.

[readthenotes1]

I wonder if anyone ever did the math on transiting hundreds of thousands of people through the previously impassable Darien Gap would have unintended consequences?