Malaysia Releases Genetically Modified Mosquitoes

Blessed_by_the_Cow writes "Apparently, Malaysian scientists have released 6,000 genetically modified male mosquitoes into the the wild. These bloodsuckers have been altered to have shorter lifespans. The basic idea behind it is to help slow down the spread of Dengue fever by killing off the mosquitoes faster."

Comments

Correction for the Summary

[eldavojohn]

These bloodsuckers have been altered to have shorter lifespans.

Actually the modified Aedes aegypti in question are not bloodsuckers. From the AFP article:

In the first experiment of its kind in Asia, about 6,000 male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were released ...

Like Homo sapiens, only the females drain the life out of their victims. The male Aedes aegypti only feed on plant juices (but I'm guessing pass the short lifespan trait on more effectively).

Moderators, ball's in your court.

Re:Correction for the Summary

[kenrblan]

For your Karma's sake, you should hope the moderators are male and not overly politically correct. Otherwise, kudos on a good one.

Re:Correction for the Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortunately, mosquitoes don't have bank accounts.

Re:Correction for the Summary

[bhcompy]

You believe this chauvinistic propaganda that only female mosquitoes drain the life out of their victims? The scientists are male, too, you know.

Re:Correction for the Summary

[DeathFromSomewhere]

I hear slashdot is serious business and every post on it is dead serious and should not be taken lightly.

Re:Correction for the Summary

[rhook]

Male mosquito's cannot drink blood, females of some mosquito species require a meal of blood in order to lay eggs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito#Feeding_habits_of_adults

"Both male and female mosquitoes are nectar feeders, but the females of many species are also capable of drinking blood from many mammals. Females do not require blood for their own survival, but they do need supplemental substances such as protein and iron to develop eggs.

With regard to host location, carbon dioxide and organic substances produced from the host, humidity, and optical recognition play important roles. In Aedes the search for a host takes place in two phases. First, the mosquito exhibits a nonspecific searching behavior until the perception of host stimulants then it follows a targeted approach.[14]

Most mosquito species are crepuscular (dawn or dusk) feeders. During the heat of the day most mosquitoes rest in a cool place and wait for the evenings, although they may still bite if disturbed. Some species, like Asian tiger mosquito, are known to fly and feed during daytime.

Both male and female are nectar feeders.
Mosquitoes are adept at infiltration and have been known to find their way into residences via deactivated air conditioning units.[15]

Prior to and during blood feeding, they inject saliva into the bodies of their source(s) of blood. This saliva serves as an anticoagulant: without it, the female mosquito's proboscis would quickly become clogged with blood clots. Female mosquitoes hunt their blood host by detecting carbon dioxide (CO2) and 1-octen-3-ol from a distance.

Mosquitoes of the genus Toxorhynchites never drink blood.[16] This genus includes the largest extant mosquitoes, the larvae of which prey on the larvae of other mosquitoes. These mosquito eaters have been used in the past as mosquito control agents, with varying success.[17]"

Re:Correction for the Summary

[swell]

Furthermore the lifespan of the male mosquito is already very short. A week for most of the 2,500 species.

Re:Correction for the Summary

[StikyPad]

you should hope the moderators are male

Wait, are you saying females are too hot-headed, insecure, and vindictive to acknowledge their succubus-like traits?

Re:Correction for the Summary

[jrumney]

(but I'm guessing pass the short lifespan trait on more effectively).

Actually, this batch of mosquitoes is also sterile. This is an early experiment, they plan to recapture most of these mosquitoes, presumably to study whether this shorter lifespan is effective in avoiding dengue fever before they start spreading the genetic modification amongst the mosquito population and have them biting people.

Re:Correction for the Summary

[kaizokuace]

I dunno what to say, I'm busy suckin on plant juice.

Re:Correction for the Summary

[aliquis]

Furthermore the lifespan of the male mosquito is already very short. A week for most of the 2,500 species.

Their scientists must be creationists.

So they develop some individuals who die quicker (but probably mature at the same age? If not they would just get kids at a similar rate compared to life span? And they would increase evolution rate?) hoping that they wont be able to have as much off-spring and thereby limit their numbers? (I don't know anything about the disease or what logic the scientists use.)

Anyway, so they get less off-spring and dies of quicker. Less off-spring = Smaller numbers of said mosquitoes vs non-genetically modified mosquitoes = even less the next time and so on so on.

Then what? =P

Release new ones?

I call fail.

obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

what could possibly go wrong?

How will they compete?

[afidel]

How do they expect these shorter lived males to outcompete their wild bretheren? If the trait is to become sufficiently distributed in the population for this to make a difference then they would have to have some method of making them superior breeders to offset the shortened window in which to breed.

Re:How will they compete?

[Locke2005]

They were bred for really short life spans and really big penises. Plus, the scientists supplied each one of them with a tiny red Ferrari!

Re:How will they compete?

[arivanov]

Dunno, in order to do that you need to release not 6000 but 6000000 the way they did it with screwworm flies in the south of the USA (and continue in Latin America).

The screwworm control method is to release flies sterilised through radiation by the truckload so that most eggs are from at least one sterile parent so they do not hatch - hence no screwworm damage to lifestock. Year after a year after a year until there is no more screwworm fly (USA in 1982).

So there is a scientific basis for this, just clearly not enough mosquitoes being released.

Re:How will they compete?

[Pav]

If this is the same project as in Australia there is no DNA modification. Instead infected mosquitos are infected with a bacteria called Wolbachia .

Frickin' Lasers.

[nametaken]

Well sure, this is clever and all... but I still prefer the shock-and-awe approach to mosquito control:

http://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_could_this_laser_zap_malaria.html

You can just f-fwd to the 12m mark for the craziness.

Think of the children!

[Xtense]

IANAGeneticist/Biologist, but... wouldn't evolution favor mosquitoes with longer lifespans? After a couple of generations, the weakened gene will get excised and the bugs will go back to the way they were.

Re:Think of the children!

[Samantha Wright]

IAABiologist, and what will most likely happen is that their experiment will die off without affecting the rest of the population. The actual process of disabling or excising a gene would probably take a while, TBH; it's way more likely that evolution will simply select against the released mosquitoes. In order to win, Malaysia would have to replace all of the males in the population, which is just silly, or give their mosquitoes some advantage, like breeding more aggressively (which is how our favourite examples of humans screwing with ecosystems, alien invasive species, become invasive.) But that's not even compatible with their goal!

What they really need to do is to poison the food supply: vaccinate humans with something that targets mosquitoes only.

Won't the normal specimens be more successful?

[ikarous]

My understanding of biology is not exactly advanced, but won't the normal mosquito specimens live longer and thus reproduce more often than the engineered offspring with shorter lifespans? Unless whole geographic areas were populated by the genetically modified offspring, I would think that this measure would be unsuccessful in the long run.

Re:Won't the normal specimens be more successful?

[alta]

You don't know females very well...

Once a male (insert species here) gets a female (insert hopefully same species here) to mate, she's done. She's not going to want to do it again period, ever, very long time at least anyway. So for male that gets that female, that ends a family tree worth of (insert speciesies here).

Need a GM to alter FEMALE mosquito's lifespan

[Nyetworker]

What they really need is a genetic modification that leaves the male mosquitos essentially unaltered, but causes the females to have a shortened lifespan, ideally unable to reach sexual maturity. GM males would continue to compete with normal males for surviving females; each successful mating by a GM male would produce a new generation of GM males to continue the process, but all females of that generation would die before ever having a chance to bite a human or breed.

Except

[Dunbal]

Dengue is not a human disease. It is a mosquito disease that affects humans. An infected mosquito transmits the virus to her offspring, so it doesn't matter how fast the "turnover" of the colony is, you will still have dengue carrying mosquitoes if the infected parent is allowed to lay eggs. I am assuming that these mosquitoes do survive to lay eggs, otherwise what would be the point of "releasing them" in the first place? In fact if anything, this could speed up the spread of dengue throughout humans (and mosquitoes) by increasing the amount of eggs laid/time due to the shorter life cycle and thus the population of dengue-infected mosquitoes. Someone hasn't thought this through. If you're going to play god, at least make sure you've considered all the possibilities (including the ones you don't like) first.

Comments funny, Dengue serious

[RobertB-DC]

I know the comments so far follow the easy pattern -- either "what could possibly go wrong, lol" and "doesn't evolution kinda favor *longer* lives?" And I'm not entirely comfortable with human populations being used as guinea pigs for disease research -- cf. Tuskeegee et. al.

But Dengue Fever is some serious stuff. It's called "break-bone fever" for a reason -- the muscle and joint pain is debilitating, and lasts for weeks or months. It's one of those things that keeps poor communities impoverished -- each person infected requires care-giving, taking two or three healthy people out of the economy for every one infected.

There's no vaccine, and nothing on the way until 2015 at least -- like many tropical diseases, there's more money to be made from lengthening a rich white guy's m@nh00d than there is in lengthening a poor brown woman's life.

So as leery as I am of making random modifications to the DNA of an uncontrollable pest... I can at least understand the motivation.

Re:Comments funny, Dengue serious

[Penicillus]

This is a good thing. I am a returned Peace Corps Volunteer from Malaysia. While I was there, several of us went camping in the Taman Negara (the rainforest that is located along the spine of the Malay peninsula), and one of us became ill with Dengue fever. We had a difficult time bringing him out. He developed a high fever, was very sick and was hospitalized - fortunately he mad a complete recovery. This is a pilot project, and I wish the Malaysians well. If the project works, economically, environmentally and otherwise, and more genetically modified mosquitoes are released, Malaysia could benefit considerably.

Re:Forgive my ignorance

[Scrameustache]

Instead of modifying them for shorter lifespans, wouldn't it make more sense to modify them so that they, you know, don't carry dengue fever? Or failing that, modify them so that the females quickly die after first exposure to dengue? I'm not really sure that creating a mosquito that lives fast, dies young, and leaves a beautiful corpse really helps with the "not spreading disease" goal...

Current gene modification technology basically works by breaking things and looking and what that did. They got a fully functional mosquito that dies faster than the time it takes to infect people on average... they reproduce it in captivity and flood the area with these guys hoping that this will make a significant dent in the rate of infection.

Your idea would require technology beyond what people are currently capable of. It would be awesome, but so would jetpacks that suck in mosquitoes for fuel .

sterile may be better

[swell]

In California we release many thousands of sterile male Medflies at the first sign of an infestation. This has been remarkably successful in protecting valuable crops. The dollar value of these crops is well known. What is the dollar value of human lives and health? If that were clearly understood, perhaps more effort would go into eradication of dengue and malaria.

The Malaysian remake of Blade Runner

[j. andrew rogers]

We know how this ends, a group of genetically enhanced mosquitos will break into the Malaysian laboratory leaving a trail of bodies while being pursued by Rick "The Flyswatter" Deckard.

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... sweaty white skin on the shoulder of a tourist... I watched bug lights glitter in the darkness at the Tannhauser Gate..."

crystal ball

[buddyglass]

I foresee lots of starving birds and bats.

Re:Malaysia and Genetic Experiments

[MichaelSmith]

Does it worry anyone else that a "developing" country is releasing genetic experiments into the wild?

Malaysia may still be developing but they are not really third world either. Many of their scientists and engineers are world class and it shows in their approach to infrastructure development. Genetically engineering mosquitoes to deal with disease is a classic long term investment with a high payoff at the end.