I have one question...can we do this with fire ants?
...and ticks
Don't forget about bed bugs.
Trial wipes out over 80% of Australian disease-spreading mosquito
91–100 of 285 posts
Re: Trial wipes out over 80% of Australian disease-spreading mosquito
#92What is the probability of these sterile mosquitoes somehow evolving and reproducing on their own ?!
(So most of the batch is sterile and cant reproduce so cant evolve. But maybe just a single mosquito of the batch is "faulty" and can reproduce and is released anyway etc etc ?)
Re: Trial wipes out over 80% of Australian disease-spreading mosquito
#93It is theorized there is no adverse effect from killing mosquito species. There is always a counter-effect. Typically it's unpredictable. Mosquitoes FACILITATE transmission of bad stuff. I believe that if bad stuff is not transmitted, species evolve more slowly against pathogens. Species will still be exposed, maybe generations later through a scratch or otherwise. At that point, having never evolved a strong immune…
Do mosquitos control other, more harmful pests that might see a resurgence if mosquitos disappear?
Re: Trial wipes out over 80% of Australian disease-spreading mosquito
#94According to the WHO ( http://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria ) * Malaria killed 445,000 people in 2016. * Of those, 285,000 were children under the age of 5. * There were 216 million cases of malaria in 2016. That is a large city's worth of children dying every year, and a large country's population having severely reduced productivity. And that is just one mosquito born illness. The guaranteed h…
The guaranteed human and economic benefits of wiping out mosquitoes, far outweigh any theoretical downside.
I like how you just state that, like it doesn't even matter what the downside was. What if bird populations crashed and a pestilence set upon crops worldwide, and caused mass starvation & millions dead- kind of exactly like what happened during the Great Leap Forward?
I'm not saying that would happen, but we can't just say "lots of people die of malaria, so don't even worry about the downside"
Re: Trial wipes out over 80% of Australian disease-spreading mosquito
#95The 20% that survived are immune to this and will now multiply unchecked.
You are being down voted because on the surface your argument seems unreasonable.
But in a way you could be correct that the remaining mosquitos have an innate immunity against mating with the sterile mosquitos. Just speculating but it is possible that some mosquitos are able to detect a sterile mosquito by the pheromones, or lack of them, that they produce (or through some other hidden mechanism that we don't know).
It is not impossible. All sexual organisms are choosy to some degree when it comes to mating. Otherwise the male would not have to court a female. More tests are needed, I say.
Re: Trial wipes out over 80% of Australian disease-spreading mosquito
#96> To address this challenge, Verily, an affiliate of Alphabet Inc, developed a mosquito rearing and sex sorting and release technology as part of its global Debug project. Verily is formerly "Google Life Sciences" and currently Alphabet Inc's research arm for life sciences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verily_Life_Sciences
If only Australia's CSIRO still had enough funding to do this kind of work itself rather than 'partner with' (i.e. contribute public funding towards the private investment goals of) for-profit companies.
Amongst CSIRO's earlier inventions are 1960s insect repelent 'Aerogard', polymer banknotes and major components of Wi-Fi as we know it.
Re: Trial wipes out over 80% of Australian disease-spreading mosquito
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ants actually serve a purpose in the ecosystem. Mosquitoes are unique in that many ecologists believe mosquito eradication would not adversely affect other species.
Strong suspicion every member of the ecosystem plays a role in sustaining the ecosystem. Mosquitos are still the deadliest animal as far as humans are concerned, makes me wonder what other populations they are keeping under control.... Ecologist hubris and ignorance of 2nd and 3rd order effects is marching with misplaced confidence towards the death spiral. *Buys more SpaceX bonds....
Places with endemic disease tend to have higher fertility rates. Mosquitoes aren't keeping the human population under control.
The ones most harmful to humans are also fairly specific about what species they bite:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anopheles#Preferred_sources_fo...
Re: Trial wipes out over 80% of Australian disease-spreading mosquito
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
They didn't do anything to the existing mosquitos. They released sterile specimens. All of the fertile wild specimens were still going about their business making more Mosquitos, but the matings between the normal wild ones and the sterile lab ones didn't result in offspring. If you roll a collection of dice, and remove all of them when they roll something other than 6, the other dice haven't "evolved" to only roll 6…
No, but dice that roll sixes more often are contributing more offspring to the next generation. If the selection pressure keeps up, you will have most dice consistently rolling 6s.
The technique has been used against other species of insects since ~1950.
There should be a horror story by now.
Re: Trial wipes out over 80% of Australian disease-spreading mosquito
#99> To address this challenge, Verily, an affiliate of Alphabet Inc, developed a mosquito rearing and sex sorting and release technology as part of its global Debug project. Verily is formerly "Google Life Sciences" and currently Alphabet Inc's research arm for life sciences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verily_Life_Sciences
If only Australia's CSIRO still had enough funding to do this kind of work itself rather than 'partner with' (i.e. contribute public funding towards the private investment goals of) for-profit companies. Amongst CSIRO's earlier inventions are 1960s insect repelent 'Aerogard', polymer banknotes and major components of Wi-Fi as we know it.
I don't see what the problem is if the for-profit companies goals align with theirs.
Re: Trial wipes out over 80% of Australian disease-spreading mosquito
#100What is the probability of these sterile mosquitoes somehow evolving and reproducing on their own ?! (So most of the batch is sterile and cant reproduce so cant evolve. But maybe just a single mosquito of the batch is "faulty" and can reproduce and is released anyway etc etc ?)
If it's not sterile, it's just a regular mosquito, of which they already have plenty in Australia...