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Sonic-powered Mosquito Larvae Eliminator
Bob Vila's Hammer writes "Inventor Michael Nyberg, at the age of 15, developed the idea for a mosquito larvae eradicator after hearing about rising cases of West Nile virus. His company, Larvasonic, has developed these devices. They utilize sonic blasts at certain frequency that rupture the breathing sacs of the larvae, killing them instantly. Remarkably, it does not harm other insects and it is considered a very effective means of destroying problematic mosquito infestations."
This can't be first post! Well, I'll be! Anyway, this is really quite interesting. Maybe someone should contact the Gates Foundation to see if this could help eradicate malaria in 3rd World nations. It looks like a pretty damn cheap solution.
Danke tres mucho, tovarishch.
OK, so I sound a little hateful, but I'm tired of being under them on the food chain. It hurts my self-esteem. (What's left of it anyway...)
I thought it was crows that spread this. If this Ny-guy can invent one that makes crows explode, I'm all for it!
West nile virus aside, think about the effect this could have on malaria. Mosquito control without the massive environmental fallout of chemical insecticides. I just hope it's cheap enough that the regions which need this can afford it.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
I bet he used to pull the wings off flies when he was younger.
Chris
> Many other animals supposedly live under water, although I can't name one right now.
Ehh, Fish?
the guy might be clever but he needs a lessson in how to get one's site indexed
I guess a
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Hey:
I'm wondering if this would just breed resistance to having body parts susceptible to sonic disruption. After all, mosquitoes breed in incredibly large numbers, so in very few generations, resistance to this should develop.
Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of "Better Living Thru No Chemicals" (tm) (grin) but I just see this thing as flawed in its longevity given the natural forces at work.
How much does ultrasonic propogate through water? These larvae are in water, right? So, the larvae that are on the surface are killed (which is most of them if memory serves about how their life cycle works). But, what about the ones slightly below the surface? And even farther? They get less of a sonic dose, and are bred for resistance.
This is the same kind of thing that's being done with lysteria and myriad other diseases/organisms by administering antibiotics in small doses to cattle / other livestock. We're breeding for better organisms that will evade our better efforts.
Good job, though, and hearty thanks to the 15 year old.
I might suggest people build more bat houses, though. Bats are known to eat half their weight in insects, mostly skeeters, per NIGHT. Note: I think skeeters must be high fiber (grin) or this would be really filling (!!!).
I have a bat house; we just moved, and I'm going to reinstall it at our new house. They're like birdhouses, but specific to bats (whose natural habitat, rotting trees and caves, are very scarce in suburbia). Contrary to popular opinion, bats don't carry disease readily because they're rather fragile creatures, they just die and people find them, think they're the disease carriers instead of the victims. Bats are actually very, very useful, and really harmless creatures. Give them a home, I say, and get rid of the skeeters that way.
Evolutionary pressures have been balancing out this predator / prey for a long time.
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
Here's his patent for this invention:
Patent 6,298,011: Method for killing mosquito larvae
A short excerpt:
"Mosquito larvae have internal organs which contain various structures, including a small air bladder. All structures have acoustic resonance, especially underwater bubbles. Since larvae tissues are fragile, simply matching the acoustic resonance of the air bladder causes acute trauma and embolism resulting in death of the mosquito larvae.
Thus, referring to FIG. 1, an acoustic transducer is immersed in a body of water which is a habitat for mosquito larvae. A depth of immersion of only a few inches is required, as shown in FIG. 1. One or more transducer is preferably connected to an amplifier which in turn is connected to a signal generator for generating a resonant frequency within an octave range ranging from 16 kHz to 32 kHz. The transducer immersed in water is energized for a short period of time. The resultant acoustic resonance resonates with the air bladder of the mosquito larvae, causing it to traumatize surrounding tissue and causes the air bubble to migrate from the thorax of the mosquito through the abdomen, resulting in death to the larvae. An effective resonant frequency is from 16 kHz to 32 kHz, and less than one watt of energy is necessary to start the process. A larger signal generator would be necessary to cover a larger body of water with rapid coverage, or the unit could be effectively moved to various locations in the body of water."
...the biotope. Several places they've tried fiddling with nature to stop plagues, like in denmark, they spilt chemicals on small lakes to stop the mosquitos from sitting on it, drowning them instead. What happened? Small birds were dying, not having enough food. Also, in denmark, they tried to stop birds eating their apples from apple farms, pulling huge nets and shooting birds approaching, discovering the birds really didn't like apple, but the bugs inside them, resulting in a great production loss. And - also - a friend of mine is doing a lot of parachute jumping. They found out that the barn swallow living in the hangar were shitting on their chutes, and started to shoot the birds, resulting in a vast amount of flies and mosquitos etc etc etc.
Perhaps not fiddle with nature after all?
roy
Computers are like air conditioners.
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... by a long shot. This concept first surfaced somewhere in the late seventies. The principle is correct however the implementation is problematic. The device needs to be in proximity to the larva or else acoustic levels have to be high enough that they do affect other insects, fish, etc. As I recall, the intitial experiments worked fine in an aquarium where acoustic properties were ideal for the purpose of concentrating the acoustic energy. (Note: after the blast the larvae keep rising to the surface with all appearance of normal breathing patterns, they just can't breath when they get there.) Not an issue for the storm drain and industrial setting. In the wetland scenario however the method is very inefficient (due to small area coverage) which means a lot of wasted resources (fuel) and disruption (vehicular traffic, etc) just getting the acoustic devices in place.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Oh, but their lifespans are miniscule. And if they have no children to take over their parasitic empire...
It'll be Genocide: The Next Generation!
The cheapest and best method for malaria disease control would be a vaccine, in which an single inoculation would deliver permanent immunity. Unfortunately, western drug companies are traditionally unprepared to invest money, in tropical/non-western diseases, due to high risks and return of investment.
At least William H. Gates Foundation has got the right idea The William H. Gates Foundation Announces a $50 Million Gift to Establish the Malaria Vaccine Initiative
Are you suggesting this might also kill Dog Eggs?
Oh my!
Something more practical in west nile terms would be a small, timer driven one that could be put in a birdbath for a whole season. The wetland and canal dragged versions are just short of silly.
The real problem with west nile at least are breeds of mosquitos that tend to prefer urban settings and can (and do) breed in the water trapped in a discarded pop can so all this would do is naturally select for the bugs that tend to use more marginal water sources.
As much as one would like to one does not want to take these things completely out of the food chain, just keep them away from areas of human habitation.
There are easier solutions in many cases, our summer place abuts a swamp where we just couldn't get in there with this thing as it's so overgrown, Last year we used one of those CO2 exhaling traps (Mosquito Magnet brand) and it's amazing how well it works, for the first time in living memory we were able to sit outside at dusk without being eaten alive. Changing a propane tank every three weeks and emptying the bag of dead mosquitos (and no other bugs) sure beats slogging through a swamp in hip waders once or twice a week...
I caught Larvasonic last summer, those guys rock.
No, it is not "simply a matter of insufficient international research funding" that is slowing the development of anti-malaria drugs.
This is certainly a problem, and more money for malaria research would definitely help.
However, you could throw all the money in the world at the problem, and still not get a good drug as quickly as you'd like. To get a drug that is effective against a disease without also killing the host, you need to exploit differences between the host and the disease-causing organism. Malaria is caused by a eukaryotic parasite. Our cells are also eukaryotes. (Eukaryote = cell has a nucleus.) Diseases caused by eukaryotic parasites are difficult to fight, because many of the cellular mechanisms are very similar to those in the host cells. Many antibiotics (which kill bacteria, which are prokaryotes) work by disrupting things our cells don't have (like a cell wall), or by interfering with processes that are quite different in the bacteria. For instance, some antibiotics work by interfering with the protein synthesis mechanism in bacteria, which is fairly different from the protein synthesis mechanism in eukaryotes like humans.
Chloroquine was effective until the malaria parasite evolved resistance to it. All of these disease causing organisms are constantly evolving, and developing drugs that the organism can't "evolve around" only complicates the drug discovery process: you not only need to target a process that is different in the disease-causing organism than it is in the host, you also need that process to be so essential that the organism can't evolve a way to survive without it.
And by the way... we don't have an effective anti-SARS drug. Doctors were using antivirals developed to fight other diseases. There was some controversy over whether these drugs were helping or not. I can't remember how it turned out. Viruses are also difficult to combat with drugs, because they mostly use host cell resources to replicate.
I grossly oversimplified in much of this post, but you get the idea.... Yes, more money would help, but it wouldn't remove the challenging biological problems slowing drug development. It would just pay more people to try to think of ways to get around them.