41–50 of 159 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
750 million mosquitos would only be about 8300 pounds. Logistically it does seem pretty difficult, but I know nothing about mosquito farming.
It's not the farming that's hard; it's the milking.
Didn't they already try this somewhere else and it wasn't very effective?
Whenever this comes up I always find it interesting that nobody comments on the now 60-year ongoing program that eradicated the screwworm fly from the US by doing pretty much the same thing: releasing millions of genetically altered (sterilized by radiation!) screwworms that mate with the native population. I have no comment on the positive or negative outcomes of the environmental modifications that both programs ca…
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Whenever this comes up I always find it interesting that nobody comments on the now 60-year ongoing program that eradicated the screwworm fly from the US by doing pretty much the same thing: releasing millions of genetically altered (sterilized by radiation!) screwworms that mate with the native population. I have no comment on the positive or negative outcomes of the environmental modifications that both programs ca…
It hasn’t come up often , but it’s certainly not true that it doesn’t come up at all. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
An interesting aspect to this debate is: what kind of actions do we sort of instinctively judge to have very large tail risk, and should we trust those judgements? Of course, the argument here is about the precautionary principle. But the precautionary principle sort of assumes that we can correctly judge which actions have potentially disastrous (non-ergodic, to use Taleb's vocab) consequences. That in itself is an…
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-49660-6#Sec10 This study is interesting. It relates to the company and what happened to the mosquitoes when they tested it in Brazil and Malaysia. TLDR: Mosquito population became suppressed at first but rebounded to pre-release levels and some carried the genetics of the GM mosquitoes (3% survival rate and can reproduce), unknown implications of hybrid vigor. "However, it i…
Whenever this comes up I always find it interesting that nobody comments on the now 60-year ongoing program that eradicated the screwworm fly from the US by doing pretty much the same thing: releasing millions of genetically altered (sterilized by radiation!) screwworms that mate with the native population. I have no comment on the positive or negative outcomes of the environmental modifications that both programs ca…
Tangentially related: "The Screwfly Solution" by Raccoona Sheldon is a fantastic (but pretty dark) short story.
Alice Bradley Sheldon (August 24, 1915 – May 19, 1987) was an American science fiction author better known as James Tiptree Jr., a pen name she used from 1967 to her death. It was not publicly known until 1977 that James Tiptree Jr. was a woman. From 1974 to 1977 she also used the pen name Raccoona Sheldon. Sheldon was inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012.[2]
I'm curious, how far do mosquitoes travel during their lifetime? If this succeeds perfectly, do we actually wipe out mosquitoes in Florida, or do we cause a short term dip in there population that mosquitoes from neighboring states quickly fill in?