Sex Sorting for Pest Control: It’s Raining Men!

In the pursuit of better pest- and vector-control strategies, attention returns to an old proven technology, the sterile insect technique (SIT) and related insect population-suppression methods. A major obstacle for any of these approaches that involves the release of sterile males is the separation of males from females during the mass rearing stage, in order to improve the cost-efficiency of these methods and to prevent the release of biting and disease-vectoring females. This review describes recent sex-sorting developments in dipteran flies with an emphasis on assessing the suitability of these methods for large-scale rearing of male vectors for mass release.