14 DAY TRIAL // Planes and other flying machines, like helicopters and drones, have been traditionally used to spray pesticides and herbicides quickly and evenly over crops. This time, however, the U.S. Government decides to unload a different kind of cargo over farms, thousands of sterilized moths.
Meant to defeat a rare cotton pest called Pink Bollworm, the U.S. Government developed a drone that carried under its wings to canisters filled with thousands and thousands of moths and have them released upon cotton fields affected by this rare and quite dangerous pest. This solution was apparently developed by USDA to quickly address the pest problem every time it hits a cotton field or another.
This way, remote-controlled agricultural drones will spray sterilized moths that, interestingly enough, do not kill pink bollworms but are grown-up pink bollworms themselves. This addition usually stops any other pink bollworms from appearing since they mate with each other and the sterilized population will stop other bollworms from spreading.
Since the lifespan of the average bollworm is about two weeks, it's expected that once the mating season is done, the small moths will die. But since they are sterile, there won't be any moth larvae to follow so this way the entire population of Pink Bollworm is pretty much dead in a couple of weeks.
