Infecundas

The title of the video is “Infecundas,” which means “infertile” in Spanish.  Miami artist Xavier Cortada documented three employees at work in a refrigerated room of the USDA Medfly Sterilization Facility in Sarasota, Florida.  Each day they vacuum millions of flies hatched from eggs sterilized by gamma radiation in Central America from their breeding boxes into specialized containers.  The irradiated flies are later released into the wild from crop dusting planes. The release of the sterilized males makes it virtually impossible for a fertile wild female Medfly in the area to find and mate with a fertile wild male. The mating between a sterile male and a wild female produces no progeny – no flies. Science is helping us eradicate this invasive foreign species without the use of pesticides. However, the battle against the Medfly will not end any time soon because humans continue to smuggle infested fruit into Florida every day. Infecundas (2007) – video: Xavier Cortada, music: Juan Carlos Espinosa. Digital video: 3 minutes, 11 seconds.