Earlier quoted context omitted.
What were you doing there?
Hopefully vacationing. Bali is beautiful.
Mongolia is beautiful too. No dengue, no malaria.
Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
321–330 of 441 posts
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Research assures government that killing mosquitos would have no negative effect on world ecology Neither would killing of the last few panda (stupid, useless animal), but we wouldn't actually do it. With mosquitoes, do to their large numbers, it would seem like a bit of a gamble. If we're wrong it would be hard to undo killing all the mosquitoes.
Really? Seems like it would be pretty easy to recreate a population of wild type mosquitoes. Just freeze a bunch of eggs. But that probably won't be necessary. Mosquitoes are too successful to be that easily wiped out. Probably best we can hope for is to get rid of 80-90% of them.
Getting rid of 80-90% of them won't do, they reproduce in such large numbers that they'll rebound in a generation or two. You really do have to aim for wiping them out completely.
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
There will be side effects, but could it really be worse than the alternative? That is, one million deaths per year.
Of course. Do you eat pesticides for breakfast? How do you supposedly kill mosquitoes without chemical dangerous products? Products that will kill people with cancer, asthma or birth defects. How do you kill mosquitoes without killing bees and other useful insects that pollinize most of the agrarian production? Most people ignore that on their own(using just wind to pollinize) the food that we cultivate the food prod…
I'll tell you how. Species-specific virus, like the one we developed in 1974 for controlling populations of gypsy moth.
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
True. But it's social and cultural evolution that matter now.
Societies and cultures are just the emergent results of the interaction of phenotypes. i.e. Culture and people are one and the same.
So?
Physics is just emergent properties of ... (math?). Chemistry is just emergent properties of physics. Biology is just emergent properties of chemistry.
It's turtles, all the way.
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#325Do we really know biological systems well enough to globalize code that nukes all X chromosomes in sperm? Maybe there are unknown mechanisms for cross-species sequence transfer. That could end up being quite the Darwin award ;)
If there is simultaneously released artificial retrovirus, carried with Plasmodium, that will transfer gene to human blood from now sterile mosquito, than we are doomed. And from what I know about the US and current state of pharma research, that is entirely technically possible and application only depends from a certain political will.
Discl. a good friend of mine developed biological weapons in late 80-ies. In 40 years there has been significant progress in the field.
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one wants to seriously wipe out all 3000+ species of mosquitoes. There are only a few species that are harmful to humans.
Humans are considered harmful to the world as a whole. There's only one human species that would need to be eliminated to solve that problem. You up for that as well?
I want to eliminate harmful mosquitoes to benefit humanity.
I place more value on the well being of humanity than I do on that of the rest of the world. In general, I value the well being of the world as a whole, but mostly because it's beneficial to humanity. If we eliminate ourselves, there can be no benefit to humanity--so no, I am not up for that as well.
In this specific case, I don't place any intrinsic value in the life of a mosquito. To me, the only factor in whether it lives or dies should be how much harm or benefit it brings to humanity.
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#327My friends in Ft. Lauderdale got a couple of CO2 "puffer" traps[1] and it really cut down the mosquito population and it was "chemical free". (caveat adding CO2 to the air I suppose) I was really impressed at how well they worked, my friend calls them the "fake cows". In the Bay Area I've never really had enough mosquito angst to try to build one. The basic idea is to lure them into range and then using a fan blow them into a bucket of sugar water. Something you could easily implement with an Arduino. That said, killing them with lasers[2] is pretty cool too.
[1] These are some examples, I am not endorsing these guys just found them for folks who were wondering what I was talking about -- https://www.megacatch.com/
[2] http://www.intellectualventures.com/inventions-patents/our-i... -- if only someone other than Intellectual Ventures had built it ...
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? Seems like it would be pretty easy to recreate a population of wild type mosquitoes. Just freeze a bunch of eggs. But that probably won't be necessary. Mosquitoes are too successful to be that easily wiped out. Probably best we can hope for is to get rid of 80-90% of them.
Getting rid of 80-90% of them won't do, they reproduce in such large numbers that they'll rebound in a generation or two. You really do have to aim for wiping them out completely.
I'm all for wiping them out totally and forever, but I doubt it's possible. Probably we'll have to settle for 90% and maybe less in the tougher environments like the wet tropics.
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's sad when a chain of logical reasoning points out (again) how weird it is that we cannot solve the real problem, which is "Why is there a third world in the first place?" Why does there have to be a region in permanent squalor? Why can't every place on earth where civilization exists be a decent place for humans to live, with peace, opportunity and sanitation? But ... back down to earth. Since we can't fix that l…
Malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases are actually a big reason why there is a third world.
Really? How so? (Not attacking ... sincere question).
Seems to me that good second-world sanitation might alleviate it. But third world countries lack the sanitation and hence suffer Malaria. Seems the problem is political/social.
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
> First, you're confusing wiping out the mosquito species with giving the mosquitos resistance to the malaria parasite. Those are two different things. You're the one who brought up CRISPR and gene drive. Perhaps you should read the actual paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/E6736.full ; you'll see that the proposal is entirely about giving mosquitoes resistance to the malaria parasite, not about eradication. T…
"You're the one who brought up CRISPR and gene drive. " Which can be targeted to eliminate the mosquitos themselves. "Perhaps you should read the actual paper" The actual paper? Like there's only one? Hint: there's more than one way to use this technology, and more than one group working with it. "On-target mutations are trivial to produce, and alleles segregate independently." I think you're misunderstanding what "i…
You should go read about MRSA, which shouldn't exist according to your logic. You also are misunderstanding how independent assortment of alleles work.
Because plasmodium is a eukaryotic species which reproduces sexually, on-target resistance mutations to any number of mechanisms can arise independently in a bunch of different organisms and accumulate through selection + allele segregation. It's also very easy to produce these sorts of mutations, since it is trivial to change an amino acid to disrupt antibody binding/recognition without altering the function of the protein.
>Which can be targeted to eliminate the mosquitos themselves.
This is incorrect; the whole point of a gene drive is that it causes increased propagation of a trait in the mosquito population. What you're describing is a very different strategy, since a trait that kills the mosquito obviously cannot propagate. It can also be achieved much more simply by using sterile males to outcompete fertile males and reduce the population ('sterile insect' technique); however, this technique only works on small populations and almost certainly wouldn't work in Anopheles or some such.