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Glowing Mosquitos Aid Malaria Battle
kfz.versicherung writes "The glowing mosquitos were created by attaching a gene for fluorescence found in jellyfish to a gene expressed only in a male mosquito's sexual organs. Even if this sounds funny, this technique is used to collect all males which are then sterilized and released in areas plagued by malaria flies. While sterile female mosquito can still transmit malaria, the sterile males will mate with the females but produce no offspring, so the insect population drops. An automated machine, capable of sorting 18,000 larvae per hour, detects fluorescence inside the larvae and a puff of air will divert the males into a separate area."
Okay, why make their "gonads" flouresce if you're just gonna make'em sterile? Doesn't help in sorting the offspring.
This is what I gathered from TFA:
1 - Breed thousands of modified mosquitoes in a lab so the males have flourescent "gonads"
2 - Put them through a sorting machine that sorts out all the ones that glow
3 - Sterilize the batch that were glowing
4 - Release them into the wild and they'll hook up with the females
5 - Less baby mosquitoes
Problems that first occured to me with that:
1 - Why not just sterilize them all? Is that hard or something? It said that the females "still spread malaria" so maybe it's that only female mosquitoes suck blood. Thats what wikipedia says. So I guess they just don't want to introduce a whole bunch of disease carrying insects.
2 - Are mosquitoes monogamous? Why will this cut down on their population? If the males are sterile, won't the females still want to breed or something? Wikipedia doesn't go into that...
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Scientist 1: "Ok here's the thing: we need to kill off these mosquitos."
Scientist 2: "Right, so how do we kill em?"
Scientist 1: "Well first we round up as many as we can possibly find."
Scientist 2: "Ahhh...then we kill em."
Scientist 1: "No no no, then we make their privates glow--but just the males."
Scientist 2: "Uh....why?"
Scientist 1: "So that they won't breed."
Scientist 2: "Right....but won't killing them also have the same effect?"
Scientist 1: "Sorry, can't hear you, this machine is busy sorting the 50,000 larvae I gathered this morning into male and females!"
Seriously, why would you spend all that time and money building a machine to sort 18,000 larvae per hour instead of just building an equally impressive FLY KILLING MACHINE.
Biological warfare is beginning to get interesting. For years, the best we could do against insect pests was to kill off the weakest ones, leaving the most capable to reproduce and multiply. We were just hastening evolution, and making our enemies stronger.
As a result, we now have resistent insects, resistent bacteria, and we're beginning to see new outbreaks of viruses that we thought we had eradicated.
We were trying to fight a faceless, undying mob by overpowering them with brute strength. Now, we're learning better. Instead of brute strength, we've begun to exploit our only advantage: intelligence. We're finding ways to use our enemies against themselves. Instead of multiplying in strength, we will help the insects to multiply themselves into oblivion.
Let's just hope we don't hasten the evolution of mammalian maternal traits in the insects in the process.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Once the female mosquitos see the male mosquito gonads glowing, wont they suspect something is wrong??? I know my wife would never have sex with me if mine were glowing.
Just reading the summary will explain all of your questions.
The fluorescent gene will not propagate in the wild, because it is only attached to sterile mosquitos. The fluorescence is only used to sort the males from the females.
As for "step 3", you just made that up. Nowhere in the article or in the summary does it talk about using a machine to kill wild mosquitos after they've been allowed to multiply.
DDT resistant mosquitos appeared in 1960 and have spread pretty much everywhere. Using more DDT doesn't work since the mosquitos become more and more resistant due to overexpression of cytochrome P450. Meanwhile, things like fish, birds and people who happen to eat those fish or birds get increasing concentrations of DDT and eventually get poisoned or start seeing birth defects.
Unfortunately, we don't go through a few generations every few months and can't quickly develop DDT resistance like mosquitos. The falcons were just an indicator and continuing would have increased the incidence of birth defects in people.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
As you may be aware, only female mosquitoes suck blood (and thereby transmit disease). The blood is to feed the eggs they lay. (Mosquitoes mostly feed on nectar, but eggs need protein.)
Whem a female mosquito has mated and found a blood meal (I forget the order of those two, but it doesn't matter), it will lay eggs.
Now, here's the trick: by captive breeding and then releasing zillions of sterile male mosquitoes, which will hunt down and mate with wild female mosquitoes, those eggs will not hatch, and the number of wild mosquitoes will go down. (Until the females evolve some defense like multiple matings.)
So you have *effectively* sterilized the wild females. This is a good thing.
You'd prefer not to release female mosquitoes, because even if they're sterile, they'll still suck blood and spread disease.
The article is about a technique for sexing captive-bred mosquitoes. By adding a very easy-to-see sex marker. None of this affects the generits of the wild population at all. They're just building an army of little biological robots that will hunt down and neutralize wild females.