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Nuclear Mutant Flies Are Good For Africa?
D\monix writes "According to this article in Reuters, the International Atomic Energy Agency is going to start releasing massive numbers of tsetse flies "sterilized by a burst of radiation" into sub Saharan Africa in order to outnumber and thus eradicate the local fly population. My favorite quote? "The impact of the fly is difficult to exaggerate." You're damn right it is. Anyone else out there think pumping large numbers of mutant insects into the environment might be a bad idea?"
this is good, vacines for wild?
Ok...
mainly because its not too much. Its a bit of intromision... I think.
-Woof woof woof!
Of course these arent /mutant/ flys. theve just been sterilised. No more radioactive than usual, and cetainly not going to pass in theyre sterility to the next generation :).
I for one do NOT A think pumping large numbers of mutant insects into the environment might be a bad idea.
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"Almost isn't good enough - but it's almost good enough."
-Me
Anyone else out there think pumping large numbers of mutant insects into the environment might be a bad idea?
Comic books and technophobic hysteria notwithstanding, exposing something to radiation doesn't make it a mutant. If it reproduces and produces weird offspring, that's mutation. If the radiation sterilizes the flies, there's not much to worry about.
-- Sigs are for losers
The original poster does not understand the issue.
These are flys that have been sterilized by radiation. They are not genetic mutants. If they will live their little lifetime, and then die. Their genes will not be passed on to another generation.
"Mutants" are offspring which have different characteristics to their parents because genetic mutation has occurred.
I am against releasing genetically modified organisms into the environment. But this is not what they are talking about. These are sterilized files. Not mutants. There is no danger here.
If it reduces the number of disease carrying files, then this is a very good thing.
Here's another paper in PDF format (or you can use Google to view as html).
Here's a very interesting excerpt, for all those who can't figure out why this might actually work:
Tsetse life-cycle.
The tsetse is a unique insect. It gives birth every 910 days to a full-grown larva, which immediately burrows into the soil andforms a pupa. Thus the egg and larval stages of tsetse are notsubject to the usual hazards and losses experienced by otherinsects.Female tsetse produce at most nine larvae. Tsetse fliesunquestionably have the lowest reproduction potential of anyinsect, and this fact makes them a good target for SIT. A single mating provides sufficient sperm for fertilizationthrough the female's 90100-day lifespan. Since females usuallymate only once, if they are mated by a sterile male they will notproduce any offspring.
The article referenced does NOT say "The impact ON the fly is difficult to exaggerate." it actually says, ""The impact OF the fly is difficult to exaggerate." Not a quick commentary on how bad the radiation is for the fly, but on how bad the fly is for Africa.
:)
...just saying.
The tsetse fly is a very important element in the preservation of wildlife in Africa - wherever there are large concentrations of the tsetse, farmers will not bring in their herds of cattle. If the tsetse was eliminated a major impediment to African farmers overrunning the natural habitat of indigenous African wildlife would be removed, and biodiversity of the region put at further risk. Anyone willing to accept for five seconds that the environment is not a simple system???
Here's another paper in PDF format.
Here's a very interesting excerpt, for all those who can't figure out why this might actually work:
Tsetse life-cycle. The tsetse is a unique insect. It gives birth every 9-10 days to a full-grown larva, which immediately burrows into the soil andforms a pupa. Thus the egg and larval stages of tsetse are notsubject to the usual hazards and losses experienced by otherinsects.Female tsetse produce at most nine larvae. Tsetse fliesunquestionably have the lowest reproduction potential of anyinsect, and this fact makes them a good target for SIT. A single mating provides sufficient sperm for fertilizationthrough the female's 90-100-day lifespan. Since females usuallymate only once, if they are mated by a sterile male they will notproduce any offspring.
When i lived in Winnipeg, Manitoba (somewhere in Canada, for all you Americans) they did the same thing to mosquitoes. Sterilize millions (males, mostly), send 'em out to mate (they mate only once) and then watch the population plummet. It's a trillion times safer than DDT and the other killer poisons they like to fill the air with during skeeter season.
The non-sterilized (genetically engineered is something entirely different) flies chance to find each other to mate amongst massive number of sterilized flies is drastically reduced. Thus also the amount of offspring.
Moreover, if only 2 flies were left on, say, 100 square kilometer, what do you think the chance is that they meet?
Eradicating tsetse from the Southern Rift Valley of Ethiopia from the International Atomic Energy Agency is more informative than the stories links. It also gives you a few photos of the areas they will be released in.
I believe that they did something like this in Australia. They brought over some kind of frogs from some other country to get rid of some parasite flies they had over there. However, the frogs figured that a normal living fly was better to eat than the parasite flies.
In the end, the frogs "took over" big areas, almost extiguishing the normal fly it started to eat, without affecting the parasite flies at all.
It's NEVER a good idea to release any kind of animals in places they do not belong. No matter what we think we know, we have no clue what's gonna happen ones they get there.
I can add that I only have a vague recollection of this incident. Maybe someone else can explain exactly what they did over there...
Yeesh.
OK, to start with the radiation is used to sterilize the flys as others have pointed out. The flys are NOT genetically-engineered! The whole plan works on releasing massive numbers of sterilized flys into the environment such that they out-compete the non-sterile flys for mates and thus reduce the number of offspring which reduces the fly population, etc. etc.
This is not the first time that this has been done. The first such project I remember was the screwworm in the Southern US about 40 or so years ago where the exact same plan was used (release hordes of radiation-sterilized screwworms) with
great success.
Dr. Frank J. Nagy Fermilab Computing Division Authentication and Directory Services Group
Those opposed might do the same, before their ill founded fears keep the world from using a 40 year old, tested and verified idea to spare some 400,000 lives and untold livestock a year. Yes, ludites piss me off.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Introducing those flies is a good thing. These animals will cause stress on the population, but with a lesser/no chance of adaptation to it.
It's just inhibition/competition with a twist to fool nature. Good flies will try to mate with bad ones. Giving nothing as result (to make it clear, the flies don't see the difference between good or bad and if bad mates with good, there are eggs but just no offsping. One reproductive cycle returns nothing...). This makes the population smaller. The twist is the fact that they can't adapt to it, wich flies can and did to several pesticides.
If you introduce a certain stress factor onto a population, like pesticides, the most fit animal (the one that is capable of reproducing) will survive and make offspring that will also have a advantage to the "old" design. Making it better in reproducing...
But in this case you induce stress on an other level, you create stress that actually isn't there. Bad flies can mate but with nothing as result. But they don't feel stress, no good fly has an advantage to a bad one. All the flies are the same, are as capable as mating as others. But the bad ones give no offspring limiting the population. Short: animals don't react with evolution on population size, as long as it doesn't cause stress (whatever it may be). That's the trick...
So you see it is safe and friendly for the environment. But you will have to keep introducing bad flies for a considerable amount of time to get some results.
ps. Mutation by radiation will never be capable of surviving. The DNA is so damaged that even if one breeds the bad fly's offspring won't be able to reproduce. Unless the effect of the mutation sets in after reproduction, but then you're talking about chances that are smaller then natural mutations in a population I think.
Using precisely this method. See
This U.S. Department of Agriculture web page
I believe this would work similar to the sterilization programs used with screwworms, a fly which likes to deposit it's larva in living tissue rather than decaying matter (e.g. housefly). In the screw worms the adult stage has only one purpose, reproduce, and they only do it once. So once a female fly has mated with a male fly it will deposit it's eggs and die. If it mated with a sterile male fly the eggs are not viable. So in order to control the population, release sterile male flies that would mate with the females, which would lay infertile eggs. Thereby reducing the number of larvae.
"And now you shall learn the secret of boot to the head"
Not to the Isthmus of Panama. To the Isthmus of Tehuantepec--but later to Panama:
"The United States-Mexico Joint Commission was formed in 1972 between Mexico and the United States with the goal of eliminating the pest from Mexico and pushing the barrier to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, just north of Guatemala. A new sterile screwworm plant at Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas, Mexico, was dedicated in 1976. With a production capacity of more than 500 million sterile flies per week, it replaced the former production plant in Mission, Texas, which was closed in January 1981. APHIS also is cooperating with Central American countries and Panama in efforts eradicate screwworms from those countries and establish and maintain a barrier of sterile flies at the Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia.
As a result of these cooperative efforts, Mexico was officially declared free of screwworms in 1991, Belize and Guatemala in 1994, and El Salvador in 1995. In addition, Honduras is considered technically free, with no pest detections since January 1995. Currently, screwworm program officials are focusing their efforts on eradicating the pest from Nicaragua and Costa Rica. APHIS hopes to begin eradication activities in Panama, the final frontier of the program, in 1997. Eradication activities include regulation of cattle movement, wound treatment, and the release of sterile flies. To date, the program has been very successful."
"The sterile flies with compete with the non-sterile flies for resources. So some sterile flies will die. This will leave a lot more than 2 sterile flies left."
That's not how it works. It works like this: The sterile flies compete for MATES, not resources. These boys are sterile, but still have all their natural instincts. Lots of mating takes place, but no fertilization. Satisfied but deceived she-flies lay eggs that will never hatch.
And, the way to tell if it'll never work, is to look at where it's been tried. This technique has worked very well over the last 40 or 50 years in screwworm eradication.
I know this post is going to be buried but I'll say it anyway:
/. FUD on this one. These flies aren't 'nuclear' or 'radioactive'. They've been steralized (by radiation) the idea being that there will be so many sterile flies that populations of flies will decrease as ones 'in the wild' mate with the sterile ones and don't produce offspring.
As someone who lived in Africa I can tell you first hand how nasty those flies are. Their huge and they hurt when they bite you. Fortunatly I was vaccinated against some of the nasty diseases they carry such as Yellow Fever and African Sleeping Sickness. Unfortunatly most of the population of Africa is too poor to even know what a vaccine is much less afford one. So any idea to get rid of the flies is a good one.
I'm ashamed by the
The Anti-Blog
For those of you who have never lived in or visited sub-Saharan Africa and who didn't bother reading the article, the tsetse fly is not "just" a "fly". A bite from a tsetse fly means that there is a high probability that you WILL contract sleeping sickness. This illness is called sleeping sickness because it KILLS you. As the article says, 80% of people who contract "sleeping" sickness end up dying. While wild animals are generally immune to the bite of a tsetse fly, horses and cattle aren't. This means that vast areas of the continent that might otherwise be used for agriculture to sustain human life are off limits, although humans still live there.
Tsetse flies do not like to fly long distances (maybe > a couple hundred metres) out in the open, in the wind. This means that one of the main ways of preventing their spread right now is to cut wide swaths through the forest at the edge of tsetse fly areas in order to attempt to keep them from the rest of the region. Then they place police/military checkpoints at the roads in these areas to look through your car and spray it. Of course, with the economy of most countries in this area, they're maybe not doing this any more as it's been a few years since I've been there. Anyways, for those of you concerned with the biodiversity of the region and the delicate balance of nature, you can chew on the ramifications of mowing down hundreds/thousands of acres of land for no other reason.
Anyways, these flies aren't just pests. They carry a deadly disease for which, as far as I know, there is no cure. I'm not a biologist (IANAB) and I can't say whether this is a "good" or "bad" idea, but these are just some facts to think about.
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science is a religion
I am a computational biochemist at Stanford and I shake my head at public responses to these things. "Oh no! Irradiated Meat! It must be dangerous!" Never mind that it's the safest and best way to ensure pathogen/parasite-free meat. Same thing here. They're "mutants" so they must be an environmental disaster waiting to happen. This is a proven technique that will work since they are introducing the exact same species. It doesn't work when you stick in predators or something (the rabbit fiasco in Australia for instance) but sterilized individuals of the same species will work great. And as Darwin would say, "who cares how mutated they are if they can't breed to pass any of that crap on?" Anyway, there's my two-cents.
If a population gets extremely small, it becomes unstable, and is likely to go extinct. When the population density is high, holes get filled in by colonization. When the population is low, clusters tend to dissipate. The tsetse has fast gestation, so it would be tough, but i picture hitting the population with a new batch of sterile males just around maturity time for all those born around the first attack. The few females left would be unlikely to find fertile males.
Worry about mutation: most mutations are deleterious, and beneficial ones are subtle changes that give offspring an advantage in competition for reproduction (food, water, shelter, survival, getting dates, getting their children succeed in the same). It's unlikely that a mutation in a sex cell in a single male, who made it through the radiation fertile but mutated and reproduced, would give his offspring an advantage over the world at large, nor even over other tsetses.
Release 1/10**9 males is fertile, 1/10**9 mutations is beneficial. release 10**9 flies, and you're releasing 1/1**9 beneficial mutations. I like those odds.
To me, the only beneficial mutation would be the mutation in the sub-saharan biome involving the loss of that speces. Maybe we can take out the anopheles mosquito next.