The Screwworm Trap Is Plastic and Glue. The Bait Inside Now Has a Factory.

A screwworm trap is not much to look at. It is a length of 13-by-6.5-inch plastic irrigation pipe, hung two to four feet off the ground, smeared with sticky glue and dabbed with a chemical blend. A fly lands on it and stays there until somebody drives out to collect the sticker, twice a week.

Everything the containment effort knows about where the New World screwworm is comes from that piece of hardware, and none of it works if the blend runs out. Which is why a contract announced Friday is less mundane than it sounds.

Eaton Brothers Corporation, a manufacturer in Hamburg, New York, that has been in business since 1934, said it has been awarded a USDA contract to make Swormlure SL4 and take over scale-up of the production. The company is best known for Treekote and Tanglefoot, the brush-on tree wound dressing and sticky barrier products sold at Lowe's, Menards and independent garden centers.

"We're always looking for new opportunities to manufacture innovative and critical products here in the U.S., and our relationship with the USDA has allowed us to bring manufacturing for this stateside," said Alex Keogan, the company's president. "This is obviously a huge risk to an already fragile industry, so we're moving at a pretty fast pace to keep up with the threat."

Eaton Brothers has spent the last 18 months working with the agency as the response expanded, according to the announcement. The niche it fills is an odd one to explain at a trade show: taking a small-batch agricultural chemical and turning it into a dependable supply.

The chemistry explains why that is harder than filling jugs. Swormlure was built from the smell of decomposing tissue, the cue that tells a female screwworm fly she has found living flesh to lay eggs in, and the modern formulation has barely changed in decades. It runs to about 10 chemicals. One of them is dimethyl disulfide — effective, and awkward to move, because transport restrictions on the compound have impeded its use in the SL-4 blend.

A USDA Agricultural Research Service team tested the obvious workaround in 2023: swap dimethyl disulfide for dimethyl trisulfide, which is far less restricted and can fly. In field trials using three releases of roughly 93,000 sterile flies each, traps baited with the original SL-4 caught 575 screwworm flies and traps with the reformulated SL-5 caught 665 — a difference the researchers reported as not statistically significant. But SL-5 also pulled in far more secondary screwworms, the harmless cousin that breeds in carrion. More wrong flies on the sticker means more lab time thrown at sorting, and a system already handling thousands of trap collections a week cannot afford that trade.

So the program stayed with the version that ships badly. Having a domestic manufacturer whose business is scaling awkward chemicals is the fix.

The stakes have a number attached. The announcement cites USDA estimates of roughly $1.8 billion a year in potential damage to the Texas economy if the fly establishes itself, with national losses running into the billions. Texas Public Radio's running count of confirmed U.S. cases stood at 61 as of Friday, most of them in Texas, and the state's infested-zone map has been redrawn four times in the past week.

What the traps do with all that bait is narrower than most people assume. USDA's own fact sheet is blunt about it: the traps are an early-warning tool, not a control method, and they "do not catch enough flies to reduce populations or stop them from spreading." Crews service each sticky trap twice a week to pull flies and reapply glue and attractant. Trapping began in July 2025, and the agency also monitors roughly 7,500 exotic fruit fly traps for screwworm arrivals. Trap lines have been moved repeatedly for a reason that says a lot about the program's fragility — to avoid catching the sterile males being released to shut the outbreak down.

That makes the bait supply a single point of failure sitting under everything else: the movement orders, the drone flights, the sterile fly plant rising at Moore Air Base in Edinburg. None of those produce a detection. The glue, the pipe and the smell do.

USDA does not recommend that landowners build their own traps, another line from the same fact sheet, and the reason is the sterile flies. A homemade trap in the wrong place catches the insects the program paid to release.

For now, the practical advice to Texas producers has not changed with the contract news. Check animals for wounds that smell wrong, report anything suspicious to the TAHC at 800-550-8242, and leave the pipe and glue to the crews who know where the trap line is supposed to sit this week.