He plans to develop it as a biocontrol agent, so that farmers can be weaned off the potent antibiotics and chemicals they use to treat their fields.
"I think we can get a biocontrol plan going in the next 5 to 10 years," Dr. Meyer said.
The scientists concluded: "Broadly speaking, the deployment of Bt crops may favour biocontrol services and enhance economic benefits not only in Bt crop fields but also in the whole agricultural landscape".
"Insecticide use usually kills the natural enemies of pests and weakens the biocontrol services that they provide," said Professor Kongming Wu at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing, who led the research team.
They play an important role as pollinators in plant reproduction, in improving soil fertility through waste bioconversion, and in natural biocontrol for harmful pest species, and they provide a variety of valuable products for humans such as honey and silk and medical applications such as maggot therapy".
"If it only attacks our target organism, then it's a-hundred-per-cent selective and it's really good for biological control," Erica Kistner, a biocontrol specialist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, told me.
Clayton, who is somewhat less enthusiastic about biocontrol than Heimpel is, hopes that the birds might develop Philornis defenses of their own before any artificial intervention is undertaken.
Philornis has never been the target of a biocontrol project — not a trivial point in a field that leans heavily on precedent.
They've been an issue since the late eighteen-sixties, and we've been throwing biocontrol at it for years".
But biocontrol projects take time.
He views the Galápagos project, with its iconic finches, as a potentially golden P.R. opportunity, a way of bringing biocontrol into the conservation mainstream.
