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Sometimes, when the government workers leave the Phoenix factory at the end of the day, their skin feels crawly -- maybe there's a tickle on the tummy, an itch on the arm -- and they're not sure whether it's the real thing or the suggestion of a paranoid mind. Always, they shake out the cuffs of their pants before they head out, put their lab coats in the factory laundry room to be cleaned, and fetch their Tupperware from the break room where the sign in the hall says, "Notice: Keep this door closed." But once in a while, workers will get home, start to undress, pulling off pants or shirt or socks or bra or boxers, and it happens. Things fly around. Photos by Nick Oza/The Arizona Republic And when it happens, workers probably shouldn't shriek or shiver or swat or scratch -- though they do -- because when they interviewed to work at the moth factory, it was implied that being an insect production worker meant they weren't afraid of bugs. In one of those gray, who-knows warehouses that surround Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, there exists a government-owned project of the creepiest kind: a Phoenix moth-breeding factory that churns out 22 million bugs per day. Yes, moths -- trays and trays of specially treated Department of Agriculture-official moths that exist to save the cotton crops of the American West. Think organic pest control. The daily moth crop is released via airplane above fields in Arizona, California and Mexico every morning of cotton season: bug showers from April to October. And the project is semi-secret -- but only because people don't really know it's there. The factory isn't labeled. The front door stays locked. A sign says, "Please ring bell for service." Let's go inside. You will want to wear closed-toe shoes. You will want those shoes to cover your ankles. Floors crunch when you walk through dark rooms during a tour. Things on the floor are moving.

It takes three weeks to grow a moth. (A carrot requires 160 days, in comparison.) The factory is 69,000 square feet of long gray hallways lined with rooms that mimic the stages of a moth's life cycle: eggs to worms to cocoons to wings. Spotted in the highest corners of the factory corridors: spiderwebs and their fat lords, smug in this target-rich environment. In Room 1: the moths' kitchen. Moth food "looks kind of like hamburger, really," says Eoin Davis, the man in charge of making the moths. He used to be a farmer. He grew potatoes. "Now I grow moths," Davis says, "and garden in the backyard." The moths' food is mixed with industrial-size equipment. There are chutes and pulleys and conveyer belts and twin extruders and vats of intriguing goop. It takes 725 pounds of dry ingredients per day to feed the moths. They eat soy flour and wheat germ, sugar and ager, a little yeast, a little corn oil, plus vitamins and antibiotics. The moth food is dyed hamburger red. We'll get back to that. Once, in solidarity with his brood, Davis put some of the moth food in his mouth. "Yeah," he says. "Yuck." Aside from the medicinal undertones -- "Have you ever chewed a vitamin?"-- he says the taste is "not entirely unlike bread dough. But I like bread dough better." For a while, there was an official moth-food taster named Earl at the factory. Earl doesn't work there anymore. They miss him. Human food is kept in the break rooms, where important signs remind workers to keep the doors closed, and tucked safely behind glass in the employee vending machine, where the most popular item is an 85-cent packet of chocolate Zingers. They do not stock the raspberry-flavored Zingers that are topped with coconut. Those look like moth worms. It is fun to be Davis at dinner parties when people ask what he does. "I grow bugs," he'll declare -- always the weirdest job at the table. But every person at the party needs him. Cotton is, after all, the fabric of our lives.

Arizona farmers grow enough cotton each year to make at least one pair of jeans for every person in the United States. For almost a century now, the biggest threat to all this Americana has been a little pink-and-white-striped worm that can fell an entire field. The Pectinophora gossypiella, or pink bollworm, exists as an adult in the form of a gray moth that lays its eggs inside a cotton boll. When the eggs hatch, the tiny striped worms emerge, chew their way through the cotton, then drop down to the ground and bury themselves for metamorphosis. They bust out a few days later as adult moths that mate, lay eggs, and continue the destruction. An infestation can ruin an entire field, thousands of dollars wasted and a commodity lost. Things got really buggy in the '70s after DDT pesticides were banned. Bollworms ruined crops from California to Georgia, all over Mexico, and in far-flung countries like Egypt and India, too. USDA scientists started revising their battle plan. They developed bug-resistant cotton seed. They combined this with pheromone technology, lacing the fields with insect hormones that prevented males and females from finding each other to breed. And they started growing moths themselves. The moths reared at the factory are pink bollworm moths, too. But before they're showered over the fields, they spend about 2.5 minutes in a radiation chamber that breaks chromosomes and destroys their ability to reproduce. When the sterilized moths hit the crops -- 22 million sent soaring each day -- the little Lotharios and Lolitas get to work mating with the dangerous, naturally born pests. They can do this all they like, but there won't be a next generation. The men are shooting blanks, and the women are just eye candy. Trophy moths.

Room 2 at the factory is 80 degrees, dark and muggy. It smells like formaldehyde. This is what it's supposed to feel like to be a moth egg living inside a cotton boll, formaldehyde notwithstanding. Workers harvest eggs from adult moths and submerge the eggs in clear plastic cells filled with moth food. The cells are stacked on racks and wheeled into Room 2, where millions of eggs incubate en masse. In the corner, there is the blue glow of a bug zapper and a sheet of fly paper studded with prisoners. "That's for the ones running around," Davis explains. "They'll either come and get stuck, or say 'Ooh, pretty light!' and get zapped." He can't allow renegades. When the eggs hatch a few days later, the bollworms are born into a banquet. They eat the yeasty red food inside their cells, which makes them turn red. This allows scientists gathering specimens from the cotton fields to tell sterilized moths from wild moths. The larvae are then moved to a different room -- also dark, also muggy. Davis holds the door. He is grinning with impish glee. "After you," he says. Even in the dark, you can see it. The floor is stained red. A few steps, and you hear it. There is crunching underfoot. Are those ...? "Yes," says Davis. You are walking on worms.

What is happening here is that the worms are eating their way through those plastic cases, which were formulated to resemble the texture of a cotton boll. Next, the worms are supposed to drop down to the trays that wait a few inches below, where they can burrow and spin their cocoons. Some worms miss the trays. Some go exploring. The floor is colored by casualties who got in the way of a foot or a cart wheel and oozed dye into the concrete. Workers clean the floor every day. A man is getting ready to clean it now. He starts up a leaf blower that will help him corral all the escaped larvae into a corner, and suddenly, a cyclone of red worms is moving through the air. "Little did you know that you've been trapped," Davis says, laughing. "You're on 'Fear Factor.'" Davis is the father of two boys, ages 6 and 9. This is their favorite room. The man who thought up sterile insects was the son of a cotton farmer. The man who thought up sterile insects was the son of a cotton farmer. Edward Knipling grew up in south Texas in the 1910s and '20s, watching his father fight insects. Then, Knipling made the bug battle into his life's work. In 1937, he was working for the U.S. Agriculture Department when it occurred to him that a barren insect might solve everything. The department's pest du jour was the screwworm, which burrowed its way into open wounds on livestock (and some humans) and laid hundreds of eggs. When the eggs hatched, the maggots feasted on the live flesh so quickly that they could kill a cow in a week. The screwworm bred like mad but lived for only 31 days. Knipling realized that if the bugs couldn't breed, then their colonies would quickly weaken and die. His boss thought the idea was nuts, but Knipling kept on, using a cast-off X-ray machine to see if he could sterilize the bugs. In 1954, on only their second test, Knipling and colleague Raymond Bushland eradicated the entire screwworm population of Curacao in three months. Screwworm-breeding factories were built in Florida, Texas, Mexico. State by state, scientists took down the worm. (Arizona: 1965.) They started sterile-insect technology on the Mediterranean fruit fly, and the Mexican fruit fly, and another bug in Africa -- anything with a short life span. Knipling got promoted and became the Department of Agriculture's chief entomologist. In 1968, a team was dispatched to Arizona to do something about a certain cotton-feeding worm that lived for only 28 days. Back then, pinkie "was a nightmare," remembers Dr. Robert Staten, who is known among Arizona scientists as Mr. Bollworm. "It swept all the way to Yuma and into Southern California with an incredible vengeance. "I saw one field they couldn't pick," says Staten, 71, who retired as director of the USDA development lab here in 2006, "and that's when I decided. "Somebody has to eradicate this thing."

At the moth factory, the next few rooms are a whir of lights and data and logs. The bugs make a stop in Club Cocoon, where a sign over the door says "Moonglow in use." "It's like a nightclub," Davis jokes. "Every hour is happy hour here." The trays of hexagonal cells filled with cocooned pupae incubate in the low light. When it's almost hatching time, the trays go to the stripping room, where the pupae crops are weighed, measured, sectioned into 380-gram batches, placed in galvanized metal boxes, assigned bar codes, time-stamped and dated. At the moth factory, they write everything down. Next, each box of pupae is shuttled to the emergence chamber, which sounds like a vocabulary term from an alien movie, and looks like one, too. The boxes of pupae are connected to a giant network of metal pipes that stretches overhead. Imagine the blue tunnel waterslides at Golfland, only not as tall. Imagine the scene in an alien movie where they hook up the humans and suck out their souls. Because when the moths hatch, they are indeed sucked from their boxes, funneled into the pipes, whisked across the ceiling and dropped into the refrigerator room. They land in casserole dishes -- 9- by 13-inch pans that pulsate with lazy, silvery newborn wings, moths piled 2 inches deep, each one about 5 to 9 millimeters long. The room is kept at 40 degrees, because a cold moth is a calm moth. "Otherwise," Davis says, "this room would be a gray fog." The trays are dumped into cardboard canisters: 2.59 million moths in each one, half male and half female. Then the canisters get zapped in the radiation room: a 2.5-minute exposure that breaks the moths' chromosomes. It is unlikely, says Davis, that this hurts. Afterward, "they're fully functional. They behave like normal," Davis says. They're just sterile. The canisters go back into cold storage to keep the bugs chilled out until morning, when they'll be loaded onto airplanes. At the end of the day, when the insect production workers prepare to go home, they take off their smocks, shake out the stray bugs, and put their scrubs and jackets in the factory laundry. Moths like dark -- pant cuffs, pockets, the fold of a sleeve. The man who delivers the moths to airports says that all his socks are polka-dotted with red stains. The bugs are drawn to warmth of skin -- chests, backs, tummies. They seek crevices. Davis showers the minute he gets home.

Battle Pink Bollworm turned out to be harder and longer than anyone thought. "It made a zealot out of me," says Staten, or Mr. Bollworm. The infestation was so bad in the '70s that scientists couldn't make enough sterile bugs to conquer it, Staten says. Back then, at a smaller factory, they could breed only about a half-million moths per day. Through the '80s, says Staten, "we played with different combinations." In the '90s, a discovery: bug-resistant seed, or Bt cotton, that slashed the number of bollworm-friendly fields -- "the biggest and most important breakthrough," says Staten, who lives in Gilbert. Meanwhile, scientists combined pheromone-blocking with fleets of sterilized moths to suppress the remaining population. Farmers stopped losing entire fields. Pink bollworm outbreaks were smaller, less devastating. In 1994, the modern moth factory opened, paid for entirely by cotton growers' funds. The factory sent its moths all over the Southwest, and even down into Mexico. ("Insects," Davis says, "don't know that the border is there.") And the bug-fighting trifecta worked, so well that scientists set a new goal: total bollworm eradication. In 2006, they amped up factory production to the current level. Between 2006 and 2011, about 27 billion moths were sent flying over the Southwest. "That's billion," Davis says, "with a B." Davis started work at the moth factory last May. These were the instructions from his predecessor: "As long as you don't screw this up, everybody will be happy with you." Right now, if you want to find a wild pink bollworm in Arizona, you can't. During the 2011 season, scientists never found a single one.