Haven’t they seen the movie Mimic?! Shudders
Genetically modified mosquitoes breed in Brazil
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Re: Genetically modified mosquitoes breed in Brazil
#72I keep hearing that mosquitoes are not ecologically important, and their extinction would have little to no ecological effect. However one indirect ecological consequence if something like this worked would be the migration of mammals to regions previously largely uninhabitable due to mosquitoes. Would such a migration and/or population increase have some ecological effect? I don't think anyone has explored this pote…
I've heard that human populations in Africa tended to stay away from the regions with the Malaria problems.
It's almost the opposite [1][2], and it's not surprising actually. People tend to forget what malaria is: it's an epidemic and it is not caused by the Anopheles, it is spread by the Anopheles if there is a pool of contaminated humans to feed from.
That's why you have anopheles in almost every all European countries (including Russia) and also in the US[3], but no malaria, because the epidemic was eradicated there.
[1]: map of the African population: http://www.utl-morlaix.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/afriqu...
[2]: map of malaria prevalence in Africa https://www.populationdata.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Af...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anopheles-range-map.png
Re: Genetically modified mosquitoes breed in Brazil
#73At a macro level, one would expect that the 'baseline' mosquito population represents an equilibrium level due to competing factors within in the local environment. While it seems very clear that releasing the GM mosquitos would never permanently alter this equilibrium, it's not obvious to me (not a biologist) that it would even work with continuing release of the GM mosquitos. It seems to assume that the limiting fa…
As far as I know they only release males, so the males will inevitably impregnate a certain number of normal females, which will have weaker offspring. So no, it's not a permanent fix, because the survivors will repopulate the ecosystem over time. But there was a significant collapse of the population for a time. And that's a win, in terms of Malaria prevention.
> And that's a win, in terms of Malaria prevention.
This experiment was not about Malaria (spread by the Anopheles genus) this is about Aedes aegypti the species which spreads Zika and Dengue fever.
Re: Genetically modified mosquitoes breed in Brazil
#74Life finds a way, and more so when populations are huge and genomes are diverse. Not exactly a surprising result. Maybe with another ten or twenty years of experience and technique in genome sequencing and interpretation we will be able to engineer a reliable gene drive.
the risk in making a mistake doing these trial runs could be huge though......they still don't know the impact this will have on the local ecosystem there across generations....Gene driving is a pandoras box that has the potential to decimate entire ecosystems by accident with irreversible consequences. I keep thinking this is how the zombie apocalypse will happen lol
> I keep thinking this is how the zombie apocalypse will happen lol
Since zombies violate the laws of physics, there's no need to worry about that.
Re: Genetically modified mosquitoes breed in Brazil
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're using mobile FF why wouldn't you take advantage of its ability to use ad blockers?
I don't think mobile FF has an ad blocker - at least not on iOS
That's because Apple only allows rebranded versions of Safari on iOS. Firefox for Android supports ad blockers.
Re: Genetically modified mosquitoes breed in Brazil
#76Despite this failure, I still think the species should be targeted for extinction. What are our options?
Do this again, but this time with a better selection of genes? The outcome isn't a refutation of the approach, only of the particular gene drive. No reason why we can't do better next time.
I hope they see it your way. They apparently used males from another species of mosquito. The females selectively chose against them. They should use the local species in another trial.
Re: Genetically modified mosquitoes breed in Brazil
#77I keep hearing that mosquitoes are not ecologically important, and their extinction would have little to no ecological effect. However one indirect ecological consequence if something like this worked would be the migration of mammals to regions previously largely uninhabitable due to mosquitoes. Would such a migration and/or population increase have some ecological effect? I don't think anyone has explored this pote…
The claim I've heard is that any one (or a few) species of mosquito is not important. There are thousands of species of mosquito and plenty of other biting insects. A few species are responsible for almost all of the mosquito-borne transmission of deadly human diseases. Eliminating those species should hugely reduce malaria but have little to no impact on wildlife that feed on insects (and you would still get bitten by plenty of insects in the tropics).
Tsetse flies and the diseases they transmit have a major effect on keeping livestock in Africa; and hence the ecology and landscape of the affected areas. Removing the burden of diseases transmitted by mosquitoes will probably have indirect effects on a similar scale. Worth it.
Re: Genetically modified mosquitoes breed in Brazil
#78I really didn't get this idea when it was first proposed, and I still don't. I'm about as far from an expert as you can get, but it seems to me that if you modify the genes of a wild population such that they produce less viable offspring you've just reduced their evolutionary fitness. That would leave a gap to be exploited by the members of the species whose genes you did not modify. On the surface anyway it seems l…
They are not trying to modify the genes of the wild population. They release a bunch of males that have this "lethal" gene, diminishing the size of the next generation. It is not a permanent solution, but it can be used during the summer to control the population size.
Re: Genetically modified mosquitoes breed in Brazil
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with those arguments is that no potential harm through such genetic modifications has been demonstrated yet. Even those mosquitoes surviving has done no harm. A downside to Hormones is that you need to find the breeding grounds. Potentially every puddle or container of water. However, the modified male mosquitoes are like homing missiles.
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 se…
Hey. In the poster's defense, they stated specifically the downside of hormones was you had to treat every breeding location, which consists of every puddle or stagnant body of water, which includes the necessity of synthesizing and delivering the hormone to every candidate breeding ground.
The idea behind the gene manipulation circumvented that logistical challenge since the males would do that job anyway.
My major issue was the lack of equivalently extensive testing w.r.t the gene therapy and whether the first crossing offspring were guaranteed to be unviable in the lab that the hormones did.
He did address your argument. I'm not one of the ones downvoting you, and I understand your irritation/frustration. Mucking around with the genome, without any proven capacity to calculate some reasonable simulation of potential ecological side effects seems fraught with danger to me as well. Whether people are dying or not doesn't detract from the fact we are trying to do something. Reality is just a real wench when she won't play ball with (elegant solution of the week).
Chin up. We learned something. We regroup, reconsider the route forward, and try again.
And have yet another problem created by our own hand to keep a finger on...
Re: Genetically modified mosquitoes breed in Brazil
#80Despite this failure, I still think the species should be targeted for extinction. What are our options?
Do this again, but this time with a better selection of genes? The outcome isn't a refutation of the approach, only of the particular gene drive. No reason why we can't do better next time.
I think the main thing it pointed out was to locally source the specimens to avoid any accidental hybrid vigor if they managed to mutate out to something viable.
Of course the outcome as is proves that males seem to make a poor long term solution since healthy ones can one to many enough to largely recover. It could theoretically weaken their genepool into nonviability if done persistently enough that the only mutant defective and inbred will survive but that would probably take a long time to converge to extinction.