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Over the weekend, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins requested the Mexican government to immediately lift restrictions that she says are hindering the U.S. response to New World Screwworm infestation in southern Mexico.
In a letter sent to Ambassador Esteban Moctezuma Barragan, Rollins specifically requested the removal of barriers that are preventing the ability of U.S. planes, operated by USDA-contracted carriers, from conducting critical activities designed to eradicate this deadly pest.
She also emphasized the urgency of the situation, saying, “Every delay in granting full operational authority and eliminating customs barriers undermines our collective ability to carry out this emergency response” against NWS, a serious threat to livestock, agriculture, and wildlife populations across North America.
Additionally, Rollins informed the government of Mexico “that if these issues are not resolved by Wednesday, April 30, USDA will restrict the importation of animal commodities, which consist of live cattle, bison, and equine originating from or transiting Mexico to protect the interest of the agriculture industry in the United States.”
NWS is a parasitic fly that infests warm-blooded animals, causing severe health complications that can ultimately lead to death, resulting in substantial losses to livestock industries.
On November 22, the chief veterinary officer of Mexico notified the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service of a positive detection of New World screwworm in Mexico. The NWS was found in a cow in the southern Mexico state of Chiapas, at an inspection checkpoint close to the border with Guatemala.
“Given the northward movement of NWS, APHIS has in recent months stepped up its efforts in Central America to partner with impacted countries to push this pest out of newly affected areas,” said Dr. Rosemary Sifford, Chief Veterinary Officer of the United States. “With this latest find in Mexico, we will further intensify this work to protect American agriculture and reestablish the barrier in Central America.”
The pest had been successfully eradicated in both the U.S. and Mexico, but recent detections in southern Mexico signal that it could against become a serious threat.
»Related: Screwworm eradication lessons from a longtime veterinarian
The letter from Rollins points to Mexico’s aviation restrictions, which have been imposed on Dynamic Aviation, a contractor responsible for high-volume, precision aerial releases required for NWS suppression.
Dynamic has been limited to a temporary 60-day permit and is allowed to only operate six days a week, while the operation requires consistent flights seven days a week for maximum effectiveness.
Customs duties have also been levied on critical aviation parts, dispersal equipment, and sterile fly shipments, which are disrupting operations and increasing costs at a time when Rollins says swift action is crucial.
In her letter, Rollins drew attention to these barriers, urging the Mexican government to engage with relevant federal entities to grant full operational clearance and secure import duty waivers for the necessary equipment. Additionally, she requested the establishment of a high-level point of contact to directly coordinate with the USDA to remove remaining bureaucratic obstacles.
In an effort to ensure continued progress, Rollins proposed the establishment of a U.S.-Mexico NWS Aerial Dispersal Strategy Meeting to align both governments’ strategies and ensure a unified approach in addressing the outbreak.
Motion-activated field cameras, GPS collars, wolf scat analysis and cattle tail hair samples are helping University of California, Davis, researchers shed new light on how an expanding and protected gray wolf population is affecting cattle operations, leading to millions of dollars in losses.
Long believed extinct in California, a lone gray wolf was seen entering the Golden State from Oregon in 2011, and a pack was spotted in Siskiyou County in 2015. By the end of 2024, seven wolf packs were documented with evidence of the animals in four other locations. As wolves proliferated, ranchers in those areas feared they would prey on cattle.
Tina Saitone, a University of California, Davis, professor and Cooperative Extension specialist in livestock and rangeland economics, sought to quantify the direct and indirect costs after the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, or CDFW, launched a pilot program to compensate ranchers for wolf-related losses.
“There’s not really any research in the state on the economic consequences of an apex predator interacting with livestock,” she said.
Saitone proposed the research to her husband, Ken Tate, a UC Davis professor and Cooperative Extension specialist in rangeland sciences. Ben Sacks, director of the Mammalian Ecology and Conservation Unit in the UC Davis Veterinary Genetics Laboratory, joined to analyze wolf scat. Brenda McCowan, a professor of population health and reproduction at UC Davis Veterinary Medicine, examined cortisol levels.
“There’s a lot of nervous ranchers,” Tate said, and “there’s a very limited amount of work on this topic.”
The interdisciplinary research centered on three wolf packs — Harvey, Lassen, and Beyem Seyo — and their interactions with rangeland cattle in northeastern California from June to October of 2022, 2023, and 2024.
The team found that:
“It is clear the scale of conflict between wolves and cattle is substantial, expanding and costly to ranchers in terms of animal welfare, animal performance and ranch profitability,” Saitone said. “This is not surprising given that cattle appear to be a major component of wolf diet and the calories drive their conservation success.”
Researchers trekked into remote rangelands to mount motion-activated game cameras, obtained access agreements from ranchers and permission to put GPS collars on cows. Neither Saitone or Tate had undertaken that kind of work, but years of collaborating on other research paid off, with land managers and ranchers providing information and support.
“This is such a sensitive issue for ranchers and landowners that it took pretty much every bit of my 30 years of network building to get us access to land and cattle for this study,” Tate said.
Local cattle ranchers and others provided tips on locations to post cameras. “Folks on the ground were really helpful in facilitating our understanding of wolf dynamics in general,” he said.
Saitone and Tate deployed a network of more than 120 trail cameras and put GPS collars on 140 cows in locations with and without wolves in their grazing areas. Every two weeks they checked on the trail cameras, swapped out memory cards and cleared away brush or branches that could activate the cameras with just a simple breeze.
The two didn’t know whether they would capture any wolf photos.
“You don’t see these animals very often,” Tate said. “They’re nocturnal. You engage with them almost exclusively via the cameras.”
But one evening reviewing trail camera data, Saitone noticed a herd of cows and calves walking fast and running by a camera for about 30 minutes, followed by two wolves in the middle of the night. “They’d been chasing those cattle and we just caught it on camera,” Tate said. “That stress event just streamed by and, for me, was the first and most exciting finding of evidence wolves were negatively interacting with cattle.”
That wasn’t the end of the discoveries.
During camera checks, they found canine scat. “Wolves will use roads and trails primarily, just like humans and cattle will,” Saitone said. “It’s the easiest path for them to take so frequently their scat is deposited along the way.”
They began collecting the scat, preserving it with desiccant and handing it over to Sacks for analysis. Of 377 samples they turned over, about 27 percent were from wolves, with the remainder coming from coyotes, bobcats and lions.
Of the summer 2022 samples, 86 percent the wolf scat contained cattle DNA and 13 different wolves were identified, all of which had eaten cattle. Over the two years, 72 percent of the samples had cattle DNA. Mule deer, rodents and occasional bear and bird DNA also showed up in the scat analysis, Sack said.
Sacks emphasized that the data didn’t indicate what killed the cattle, “it just tells us what’s for dinner,” he said.
Gray wolves are protected under the state and federal law as endangered species. CDFW’s depredation compensation program paid out $3.1 million in initial funding and the agency said April 2 it was moving into a new phase of wolf management given increasing population numbers.
The next phase entails evaluating the status of gray wolves, evaluating potential permits to allow “less-than-lethal harassment” such as noise or use of motorized equipment to deter the predators, an online tool to provide location details of wolves with GPS collars, investigating livestock losses due to depredation and other actions.
Saitone and Tate say the research could better inform the conversation.
“We do need to get toward some kind of coexistence,” Tate said. “We don’t know what that’s going to look like but it doesn’t look like what we’re doing now, that’s for sure. It’s not sustainable. This research helps, I think, to advance that conversation.”
This article was written by Emily C. Dooley and is republished here with permission from University of California Davis.
The Youth Empowering Agriculture — Research Extension Apprenticeship Program works with 1890 land-grant universities to pair 4-H students with college-age mentors.
CC Cattle Company is a nonprofit farming operation that raises cattle on 13 acres and donates the entirety of what is produced to local food banks.
Through Valor Provisions, a direct-to-consumer online store specializing in high-quality meat, Patrick Montgomery removes the middleman in the American beef and pork supply.
