Dispersal of the Old World screw‐worm fly Chrysomya bezziana

Abstract

Dispersal of the Old World screw-worm fly, Chrysomya bezziana Villeneuve, was studied in Papua New Guinea by releasing radio-isotope labelled, laboratory-reared flies and collecting their labelled egg masses from sentinel cattle. A log-linear model was developed to describe recapture rate. Distance was found to dominate the model and was represented by a bilinear ('broken-stick') term as log-distance. Further terms in the model such as attractiveness of the site (estimated from the number of non-labelled egg masses), the season of the year and a time trend were statistically significant but of minor importance. From the model, the median distance females dispersed before depositing an egg mass was 10.8 km. The maximum distance from the release site that egg masses were recovered was 100 km. The dispersal ability of C. bezziana is discussed in terms of its impact on the prospects of eradicating this species using SIRM if an outbreak occurred in Australia.