Story and photography by Bob Zaiglin

In 1976, Texas spent some $132.1 million responding to the invader — now 50 years later, we are about to face the same situation.

As a Texas A&I University wildlife graduate student, my field research was conducted on the Zachry Rancho Blanco Ranch 18 miles south of Laredo.  After moving to the ranch in early 1976, I was preoccupied by my research project focused on the effect a supplemental feed source had on antler size and reproduction.

But under the tutelage of Al Brothers, the manager of the ranch, I was involved in all aspects of ranch management.  Like any job, there is always the good, the bad, and the ugly, and the worst aspect to my early ranch experience was doctoring newborn calves that were infested by the New World screwworm.

I would saddle up at sunup with the ranch cowboys, and we would ride the pasture looking for newborn calves which we would capture by hand or rope, depending on their age, clean their umbilical cord, and apply a black-colored, sticky salve called Smear 62 to it to prevent flies from depositing eggs on the sometimes bloody, moist cord.  Our work wasn’t finished until we examined the animal head to tail for any wounds as the New World screwworm fly would deposit its eggs on a bloody wound of any warm-blooded animal, and the larva or resulting maggots would literally consume the animal alive, unlike the larva of the common blow fly, which eats only carrion.

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