Screw Worm Invades Texas | Refuge Manager Confirms Path Forward

Ajouté : 2026-06-06

[00:00:00]That's quite a bit. And you think about the percentage of your herd that's white tail buck. And as I mentioned earlier, according to this report, the final report on the Florida Keys outbreak was that 90 to 95% of the affected deer were mature bucks.

[00:00:14]And that that's a little alarming because when you think about that, how does that impact your deer herd as a whole? You know, you're talking about completely taking the mature buck level off of the landscape and destroying your age structure.

[00:00:45]Well, happy 1st of June everybody. I cannot believe how fast time is going by cuz you know July is like uh that's a lot of uh people's uh trail camera season. We start to break out the ch trail cameras and if you like ticks and bugs and snakes, you can go start getting them out and tracking some of those velvet bucks cuz we all love some velvet buck pictures. So, happy summer guys. Happy June. And that also means Father's Day is coming up. And I'm looking for some ideas and recommendations cuz I'm trying to throw some hints out to the family. And uh I'm kind of looking for some new base layers uh for you know camo base layers. No no no specific brand. So you know and in Texas a base layer is kind of like your allseason layer because it pretty much doesn't get less than like 80° unless there's a cold front and as soon as it's done that temperature gets cranked right back up. So ain't no really such thing as a base layer here. So, but I'm I've been looking at like uh like Cuyu uh Predator Camo and uh you know, of course, what um Broadside Camo has to offer, but I'm really looking for like a hoodie top base layer with like the built-in mask, something like that. You know, some some thumb rings. I really like those. So, you know, First Light has some good stuff, but I'm looking for those who are offering big folk stuff because what I did find out was that Kuyu has like an inseam on their pants that they offered in 36 and Predator camo kind of does the same thing. So, I'm thinking about dropping some hints to the family for for some new some new good pants. I just want some pants so my socks don't get wet and my feet and legs don't hang out, you know, when my saddles pulling up on my pants and all that kind of stuff. So, let me know what you guys are are dropping hints in the family uh for Father's Day or what's a good Father's Day u present for dad this year because I got to figure that out too. But if you got any recommendations on the camo for the base layers and some long pants, anybody else out there that offers long pants and long length suits in general, I I'll take every every recommendation I get. So, other than that, thank you guys for stopping and checking out the show. I really appreciate it. Appreciate your time.

[00:02:56]Thanks for joining me. And if in a recent video, the one that we did about the changes in the wildlife refues.

[00:03:02]While I was talking to some of those refuge managers, um they they he actually brought up the topic, which is what we're going to talk about today, and it really caught me off guard. And before we get into that, um some of you guys have been asking some really good questions, some follow-up questions to the videos in the comments on YouTube for the most part.

[00:03:24]And you know, some of them is just around, you know, permit acquisition, uh, bag limits, access, like campsites changing on some of the refugees. Really good questions that probably I didn't answer in the podcast. So, what we're going to do is I'm going to take a handful of those and on the on the following podcast, I will bring those answers back to the table. we'll find the answers and if I don't have them already and we'll bring them back and uh we'll call you guys out, you know, by name, by tag, and uh we'll get some of those answered for you. I I don't mind doing that at all. So, I'm looking forward to that. So, drop your questions if you have anything that doesn't get covered, you know, whether it's something area specific, unit specific, I it doesn't does I don't mind. We'll get we'll get those answered for you.

[00:04:06]Maybe we'll go over those like at the beginning of the next podcast that we do. And uh so, keep those questions coming. really good questions and I really appreciate it and I hope that helps not only you but it'll help everybody else out who's listening as well. So, thank you so much. And so, for the topic today, while I was talking about while I was talking to a refuge manager, two different refu refuge managers in South Texas, he brought up the issue of the screw worm. And we're we're not we've already known this was coming. I think we may have made a post about it even a few months ago because they've been tracking the screw worm throughout Mexico and South America coming up from Panama is kind of like where it gets pushed back to like where it originates from. And one of the last known, you know, cases was 150 miles from the border of Texas.

[00:04:58]Well, one of these managers pretty much told me that there was a a documented case less than 20 mi from the border. He said, "It is here. Let's just keep it short and sweet." He said, "It's here.

[00:05:09]We just haven't found it yet. So, it's coming." And he kind of and I said, "Well, yeah, I know. I do know a little bit about that." I said, "But, you know, how are we going to deal with that? You know, what's you guys plan from a management perspective on this refuge?"

[00:05:25]And he gave me some feedback on that.

[00:05:27]So, but before we get into that, we'll we'll just talk a little bit about the history cuz if you missed the podcast with Larry Weissoon, he talked about the screw worm. He mentioned it. I don't know if you caught that. If you go back and listen to it, I think it's in a short as well, but we were talking about the impacts on the rut. And we're talking about the early days of the questions and some of the challenges that they were dealing with in the early days of wildlife biology and and quality deer management. So, and he mentioned back in 1966 in the mid60s, we had a screworm outbreak here in Texas. And some of the studies say that is as regionally we had deer herds affected as high as 30 anywhere from 30 to 50%. That's huge.

[00:06:10]And some of the other studies have suggested, we'll we'll we'll talk about a case study here in a minute, that somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 to 95% of those affected deer were mature bucks. And I was like, that's insane. So, and I mean, and that's from Texas A&M final case study that come out of the Florida Keys back in 2016. So there's not as much data on the early outbreak in the 60s except for kind of overall sparse, you know, percentage of impact, but when you look at how the screw worm works and how the mature buck works, that's kind of why they become susceptible to that and the and and and the fawn specifically. So back in 1966, we dealt with this outbreak and it's we're probably going to deal with it much in the same way.

[00:07:01]So, what the screworm is is it's a nasty little critter. I mean, it's basically what we we all think it is. It's a maggot. And what happens is the female screworm fly lays lays its larvae on an open wound, an open orifice on an animal, mammal, even a human. You know, something like the private parts on the backside of a deer, an open wound, even something as small as a tick bite on an animal. and they lay the larvae in there and the larvae pretty much begin to feed on whatever warm-bodied animal critter that that is and it burrows its way into the body and pretty much eats this thing from the inside out. Um, typically for about a week or 10 days, creates this massive wound that becomes infected, you know, and the deer succumb to it, cattle and the like. So, and then they drop out, they go in the ground and they finish developing and they become and then they come out as flies. So, you know, and female screwworm flies have two to 300 eggs, you know, every time that they produce them. So, it gets big fast and it gets ugly fast. You know, we all know how flies are. They're they're nasty. We we don't like them already. We don't need them burrowing into our eyeballs. Uh because there was a case of a dentist uh not, you know, it was kind of a one-off case, but he was he was doing some dental work on a patient and he found a screw worm like buried in the lower lip uh at the at the front of the jaw that the the patient didn't even know existed. So yeah, that'll that'll pretty much keep you up at night.

[00:08:38]So we're going to And so I asked him like, well, how do we deal with that?

[00:08:42]And and Larry talked a little bit about it as well. So what they do is to combat that and they've already been doing this. Some people think that this is new news or something, but they've been tracking this for the last year or two because it's been slowly migrating north. And what they do is they have these facilities that treat male screwworm flies uh with radiation and they make them sterile and then they take millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions and then they go and they drop them over these affected areas and they mate with the female screwworm fly and the female can only mate one time and then she stores all the sperm and she tries to produce the eggs based on that within her short lifespan. But when she receives that sterile sperm, she can't do nothing like some of us. So that's how that's how that works. And then she can't produce any offspring. And the male flies can can mate more than once.

[00:09:36]So I can see how you know that you could it's a very very effective treatment.

[00:09:43]You know, other things is like setting you know different types of fly traps and things like that. So that's how they deal with it. And some people have accused like the current, you know, government or the USDA or the wild US wild US wildlife and fisheries of being kind of like not taking the threat seriously. But I I think it I don't think that's really true because I I did find that, you know, just within the last 18 months or so, the USDA and the government approved the construction of a $300 million facility right here in Edinburgh, Texas, dedicated to the production of sterile flies for this treatment. And it's obviously not complete yet, but it is under construction. They've already broke ground on it. That's as as far as the reports go. And since they've seen this coming, they got approval to build a $8.5 million facility on the same location, fasttracked it so they could deal they could get production in place on a smaller scale to deal with this because they knew this was coming.

[00:10:44]That's already there. So this this isn't something that really snuck up on us. We knew it was coming and you know, according to these local managers, it's here. So it's just a matter of time. So that's how we would deal with it and that's how they've dealt with it in the past. And they're already dropping these batches of sterile flies in Mexico, South America, and that's that's already been going on.

[00:11:08]And they're referring to this as the new world screworm. I think that's just like a buzzword, a term kind of flavor of the month type of thing. So it looks good on a headline. There's really nothing. The screworm hasn't evolved. It's doing the same thing it did back in the 60s and you know since the beginning of time I'm sure. So you know that's just a term.

[00:11:27]Don't think it's anything that that's evolved that I have read. So don't put any stock in that and and where that comes from. So the question is how would we deal with it in Texas? And maybe it's regionally different but when you're looking at some of these refugees and the feedback that he gave me I told you I asked him and I said would we have to shut down some of these units? would we have to have reduced tags? Would we have to, you know, start capturing deer?

[00:11:52]He said, he said, "No." He said, "Actually, uh, quite quite the opposite." He said, "We would, we would have to take more deer off the landscape." He said, "You know what happens is these deer, you know, they get these big open infectious wounds, pus, you know, and we would instruct our hunters that if you see any of these deer, you know, you could take them, you know, under incidental take and dispatch them, and we would come out, do a localized inspection, a little localized autopsy, see what they can find. And if they do discover that it's it's the root cause of being the screwworm infection, they can kind of quarantine off that localized area, you know, mark it and start to create a heat map so they can see where things are moving and they can track, you know, where treatment is effective, where it's not, you know, where the where the fly impact is moving. So in a basic lay terms, you might get to shoot an extra deer. You know, it's not going to shut down the hunting. Now, it takes more deer off the landscape. As I mentioned, there was a case in 2016 in the Florida Keys. Now, we're talking about kind of a specific type of deer herd, right? The Florida Key is a very unique, very unique whitetail herd. And there's not a ton of them. You know, maybe 15,800 on the landscape at the highest point. And they had about a 15 to 20% impact rate on their outbreak in 2016, which only lasted about a year and a half. By 2017 they pretty much had it under control.

[00:13:20]They had it pushed back but it it it took out about 150 whitetail anywhere from 130 to 150. So of about a500 maybe 12-500 whitetail her capacity. So you know you think about a thousand deer if you lose 15% of them you use lose 150 deer. That's quite a bit. And you think about the percentage of your herd that's white tail buck. And as I mentioned earlier, according to this report, the final report on the Florida Keys outbreak was that 90 to 95% of the affected deer were mature bucks.

[00:13:53]And that that's a little alarming because when you think about that, how does that impact your deer herd as a whole? You know, you're talking about completely taking the mature buck level off of the landscape and destroying your age structure. you know, you now you now you're dealing with, you know, three and four year olds at best, you know, is kind of what I'm assuming. Maybe worst case scenario, you've got a bunch of, you know, two-year-olds, maybe a few three year olds and year and a half old bucks. So, your age structure is totally demolished. Then you've also skewed your buck to ratio. You've completely, you know, taken the top off of that thing.

[00:14:32]So maybe you had a good ratio in place, you know, a good buck to dough ratio, and now that's been severely minimized.

[00:14:38]So now you're going to have doese's that aren't getting bred or aren't getting bred in that initial uh estrus phase and maybe they're going to get bred in that secondary or tertiary phase which you know maybe in some areas goes out to February, late February, something like that. Then you've got these really late born fawns who are at risk you know when they're being born in August or something like that. And you know, if they're bucks, maybe, you know, we talked about that from a nutrition standpoint and body development and a dough's ability to produce milk and and the production of spikes. Uh, even Larry mentioned, you know, when you get into situations like that, a lot of these lateorn fawns and the bucks, uh, very very often do they produce spikes and it takes them a year, year and a half to develop their body weight and they're kind of behind from then on. it takes some time to develop that body structure and really be able to support themselves. So then you've got this rut that is totally skewed where maybe you had, you know, a sort of peak rut date when most if a good buck to dough ratio is in place and you've got a really good peak rut date. you know, initial peak rut and that secondary rut is maybe very pointed, but now you've got these that are starting to be bred uh a a lot of different dates across the landscape and you've got a bunch of young bucks chasing them around. So, your rut's going to look totally different. You know, it's it's it's going to be a different type of experience because the whole social order has just been disrupted and it's it it it takes time to recover.

[00:16:16]It's going to take the deer herd time to recover. just just bottom line.

[00:16:20]And in addition to the the bucks, you know, one thing that Larry specifically mentioned is that the fawning rate suffers as well. Although, when you look at the data, they don't they don't point to the fawning rate as much. They just point that they're they're additionally susceptible because they come into this world with an open wound. When that umbilical cord drops, the the flies are attracted to it just like they're attracted to any other gut pile. They go in there and they lay their larvae in that open wound and that fawn doesn't have a chance. Um, it eats the fawn. The fawn dies. So now your fawn rate is they screwed up. So we've got more deer coming off the landscape.

[00:16:59]And you know, and it's the same impact for the cattle. You know, nature doesn't know the difference like we do uh when it comes to, you know, warm-blooded mammals being affected just like just like we're susceptible to being affected. So, it's it's some people don't think this is a big deal, but this is here and it's coming and we're going to have to deal with it this year or the next. It's just a matter of how big. But some people don't think it's a big deal.

[00:17:27]Maybe our modern technology and our response rate and our communication and, you know, ability to communicate across borders and and deal with it is something we'll be able to knock back pretty quick. But if I mean, if that was the case, how did they let it get here in the first place? you know, it seemed like we could strong arm, you know, impose a little will and throw our throw some money and treatment at it before to keep it from actually getting here. But because we've been tracking it for a thousand miles and it still got up here, that's the only thing that gets me is if we had the ability to treat and we have the ability to we have the ability to head off the migration of these flies coming in, why why why weren't we really effective doing it and why are we going to be effective now? So, you know, it's kind of like it's not important until it is kind of situation.

[00:18:14]And so, it kind of remains to be seen. Um, so let me know if you think this is this is important or it's, you know, they're kind of blowing it out of proportion or that this is actually going to become an issue because this is this is something maybe maybe it moves beyond Texas. Where does it go when it gets to Texas? It you know, does it not make it out of Texas?

[00:18:38]Who knows? But, you know, even when you look back at the impact on the on the cattle industry and the food industry, the the Southwest Cattle Association, they've got estimates that uh you know, the beef industry could be impacted up to $1.8 billion. And then, but they're saying the impact to the wildlife side could be $9 billion. I don't know how we're almost 10 times the impact as far as the impact on the wildlife. U maybe because cattle are a little more they're they're more visible. We've, you know, we've got ranchers, we've got herds that are being checked a lot more and we can we can we can treat it a lot better, you know, and I think that's the case because you can't catch a deer probably before it's too late, before it's not affected. So, with your cattle herd, you will see some impact, but we can see it and you can treat it because you can treat it. You can treat the wound, you know, you can extract the flies. I'm kind of assuming that's what I've read. You know, it is treatable. So when you can monitor your local cow when your local herd, your local cattle, and you can treat them and you know they're boxed in, they're fenced in. You can't do that with a white tail herd.

[00:19:44]White tail don't want to be seen. I believe me, I know I spent a lot of time not seeing them. So, but I you know I think that's the difference when that when you know the way they quantify that and uh but any impact to our food chain and our food supply right now is is sucks because it's already crazy expensive. So, and so those figures are are just kind of kind of alarming. You know, Texas is is we supply a lot of the beef across the country. So, it kind of remains, you know, I'm I'm interested to see the impact. I'm interested to see if the impact is premature, you know, if we get taken advantage of a little bit and and some of this some of these market changes and things like that because that kind of seems to be the case. Anytime there's a threat, it's kind of like a response before the threat actually has a chance to make an impact.

[00:20:36]You know, it's just it's just us getting getting gouged and and taken advantage of once again. So, but overall there there's some potential here and and and it's coming and it is going to be big news when when we do find out that we've got more and more cases here in Texas because they agreed that it is coming. Now, he didn't sound like like worried. He's like, "Yeah, we know it's come. We we knew it was coming. We've been watching it. We've been monitoring.

[00:21:03]We've got a plan." So, that maybe that did make me feel a little bit better.

[00:21:08]So, I don't have a lot of concern on that front. So, all we can do is kind of understand what's going on. Uh, keep an eye out.

[00:21:17]You know, he did mention, like I said, they're going to instruct all their hunters and all their units to watch for deer that look extremely unhealthy, that have open wounds, that have, you know, pus and boils and things like that and and to report it and and dispatch the deer. They're they're going to afford them that opportunity to do that. So, but we're going that would take some deer off the landscape, right? So, they've got a plan in place. Overall, I'm anxious to see how this this turns out. This is going to be, you know, this is going to be something we're going to refer to in the future, just like Larry did back in the 60s. So, we we'll we'll see how all this shakes out. But once again, if I didn't answer any some questions within this podcast, I know this is a pretty specific topic, but if I didn't answer some questions, just drop them down below. If there's anything you're curious of, you want to know, off-the-wall questions, or this one or the past podcast, I don't care where you drop the question. If you saw something recently in a different video, just drop it and uh we'll try to get you an answer. We'll come back and we'll we'll answer, you know, five or six questions each each show. So, thank you guys so much for stopping and checking out the channel. And if you're watching the video, thank you. I've dropped a bunch of visuals and charts to try to, you know, try to show you guys, verify what I've been seeing here, what I've been finding. But if you didn't get a chance to watch and you're listening on the audio version, which you can do over on Apple Podcast, Spotify, the whole nine yards. If you're listening over there, I encourage you to come watch the video version because we try to do our best to make it worth it. So either way, thank you guys for the support. Thanks for all the feedback. Keep the questions coming. I hope this video is informative. And this is a place where you can get a little bit more information than normal, especially for for us Texans. And I hope my friends and beyond are paying attention because, you know, this could be something that's impacting impacting you before too long.

[00:23:06]So, thanks guys. Have a good one. We'll see you back on the next video. We've got a great interview coming up. Uh he's coming in just like two days and it's going to be a cool interview. So, I think the next the next video is going to be we're going to get back to covering a deer story and it's going to be really cool. I can't wait to talk to him. So, tune in for that show going to be coming up next week. So, until then, take care of yourselves and we'll see you on the next one.