And again, just like the others in the past who I argued with, you read nothing I put down. You saw hormone and knee jerked.
The hormones in question are not found in other animals, and has been widely tested for a decade prior to field use in Florida. Working off my memory from diving into this a few years ago, the hormones are what regulate the dissolve rate of the shell pupa to adult stage. It's introduced at a seasonal time for the larva to be in bodies of water, after certain storms. The hormone they put in, stop the shell/casing from softening so the adult mosquito is essentially buried alive.
The reason why the gm wasn't going to work was the low affected rate of mosquitoes. In rainy areas, the breeding cycle and amount is high enough so about a few months later, they're either resistant due to evolution or the affected pools were just absolutely meaningless to begin with. Let's add in, Ae. aegypti eggs, and most aedes, for example, are recorded to survive 8-14 months dry and hatch around a week after first moisture. The whole "experiment" was already a complete waste of time from day 1. The mosquito is a resistant SOB survivor to begin with. These "homing missiles", which failed, equates to using a single shot pellet rifle against a swarm of yellow jackets. Aedes is not a genus to take lightly. And actual field scientists who deal with it on a serious basis and do actual real useful work, know that. The breeding grounds are typical too. It's only after heavy storms where people have buckets out are real problems. And new developments that displace land. But they're normally figured out in a few months and thrown on the list.
My fear with gm in anything in the animalia kingdom comes to what genes become expressed more with the lack of expression in another. Especially over time if the sterilization factor didn't pane out as well as hoped. A 0.01% fail rate in sterilization to a creature like Ae. Aegypti (150-300 egg lay rate, 2-3 lay cycles, 10 day egg to adult) can be disastrous. Look, if the prior articles about the research went "We have evidence that it works, but we're afraid of unexpected fallout, thus we're testing for any potential adverse effects..." I'm chill with that. I want to see that succeed. They understand the risks and work to minimize those risks as best as possible. Cool. But every god damn time I see gene manipulators do anything with a wide scale insect like mosquitoes, they just Silicon Valley rush into it "Yea, we did it for 2 months and it works and we're going to release it into the wild". Like a Cali group wanted to do a few months ago, I want to scream. It's Mao's dumbass 4 pest crusade all fucking over again. Without a shred of thought into such a complex system that is the environment. Yea, break things fast. Who cares about consequences. Not like we have enough environmental fucking problems as is. Let's play Life on Earth on hardcore mode some more.
But oh no, a program that was in lab research for a decade before actual use. University oversight and testing to make sure only minimal amounts are used so any type of kickback can be contained quickly. And after 2 decades of use. That bad. Real bad. We should do shitty testing for a few months and consider it golden. Let's not forget, there's a group of assholes doing the same by genetically modifying a fungus to produce a type of venom to kill mosquitoes. I'd laugh at that stupid idea if it was left to hollywood. But there's a research group literally trying to do that, and they're having some initial success.
I am just absolutely sick and tired of people thinking 2+2+I want to save the world=22. And that's all I see in this garbage. While these red herring dumbass ideas have large sums of money thrown at them, people ARE FUCKING DYING because of this instead of that money going into either using proven methods or policies to minimize breeding rates or even just medical aid. I'm all for finding new ways. I wouldn't visit a tech news aggregate if I wasn't. But "new" doesn't automatically mean it's better. Without that respect to reality, it's doomed to fail.