Machine learning can control tsetse flies

FEMALE tsetse flies mate for life. Or, to put it more accurately, they mate once in a lifetime. That gives those who would control these pests an opportunity. A female that mates with a sterile male will have no offspring. Arrange for enough such matings to occur and the result will be fewer tsetse flies—and, with luck, less sleeping sickness, a disease spread to people and cattle by the flies.A project under way in Senegal suggests this works. For the past five years, male tsetse flies sterilised using gamma rays have been dropped three times a week over infested areas. This has pushed the local fly population down by 98%, with a concomitant fall in sleeping sickness. But projects like this require huge numbers of sterile males to be bred and delivered in a timely manner. And that is hard.