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Sex-Switched Mosquitoes May Help In Fight Against Diseases
cstacy writes: Only the female mosquitoes bite and transmit viral diseases such as Dengue Fever. Scientists have finally discovered the elusive genetic switch called Nix, that determines the sex of these blood sucking insects, and hope to selectively eliminate females to control the spread of diseases. "Nix provides us with exciting opportunities to harness mosquito sex in the fight against infectious diseases because maleness is the ultimate disease-refractory trait," explained Zhijian Jake Tu, an affiliate of the Fralin Life Science Institute and a biochemistry professor from Virginia Tech's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
Am I mistaken, or if you switch off the ability for them to be female, after a single generation, they'll be extinct anyway. So why not just kill them all and be done with it?
Jurassic Park tried this also. Life finds a way.
the human kind
What could possibly go wrong?
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
Waiting for the SJWs to be triggered by our sexist pest control techniques.
Scientists, making gay mosquitoes on purpose?
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Anyway, sex switching is the future. There is no reason anyone should be stuck with a sex arbitrarily chosen by nature. Everyone should be able to pick and choose whatever is best for them at any given moment in their life. Thankfully at least the Irish people have the insight to understand this.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
FTFA: "The scientists injected Nix into mosquito embryos and found more than two-thirds of the female mosquitoes developed male genitals and testes."
I wonder how much each of these mosquitoes would cost to be produced, and how many of them would be needed to make a difference at the non injected mosquitoes population.
I, for one, welcome our new transvestite mosquitoe overlords.
But would this technique work on politicians? If we could get them to all be one sex, or the other, then they wouldn't reproduce any more.
...shall be called Brosquitoes.
I remember a sci fi story published in Analog magazine way back in 1977. Amazing the stuff I keep stored in this brain. Anyway, look it up. It was quite amusing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution
I used to disagree with the philosophy of the laser zapping mosquito killer...
But now... if we switch them all to female first, THEN zap them... I can agree.
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for one, welcomes our trannie mosquito porn.
Nix, like the Greek goddess of infernal night?
According to the article it would seem there is a bit more being done here than simply changing the mosquitos' gender...
"The study lays down the groundwork for developing strategies to control mosquito numbers by changing females into harmless men"
All statistical. Apart from body hair I'm sure it possible to find more "manly" looking women out there than most of the males posting to this site - though outliers people are a pretty varied bunch.
Once again, those people in the middle and statistics come into play, a range instead of ones and zeros.
Have gnu, will travel.
Yeah, I can see some kind of Jurassic Park scenario playing out when they try this, and with our luck it will occur in Winnipeg, which is renowned for the size, voracity and general thuggishness of its female mosquito population.
I have little doubt we'll wind up with packs of mosquitoes sporting flannel shirts, Doc Martens and schnozz spikes the size of a rhino horn, along with the general demeanor of a Conservative whose wife just left him for an environmentalist.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I wonder if this would be any more effective than the GMO mosquitoes developed by Oxitec. It's a fascinating technology - the mosquitoes are modified to have a "dominant lethal" allele that can be suppressed by feeding the mosquitoes tetracycline. They raise a generation of mosquitoes with access to tetracycline, separate out the males, and release them into the wild, where they breed with wild females. All their offspring die during the larval phase. The release plan usually overwhelms the local wild male population, so the population crashes hard (90+%) within a generation or two. And the trait doesn't "escape" because it's 100% lethal even with just one allele.
They've had a lot of success in their field trials - Brazil is moving forward with it, as are several Caribbean islands. They were going to use it one the Florida Keys but, of course, someone sued to stop it, so it's on hold ATM.
This sort of bio-engineering can have possibly far-reaching and disastrous results. These insects are major components of various food chains .. Bats, e.g., depend on them .. and where bats comprise 25% of earth's mammalian body-weight, it's clear the ramifications could be tremendous..
It might be best were they to obtain a 'switchable' lethality approach . .. where there'd be less risk of total destruction of all mosquito populations, whether they be part of a disease cycle or not .. It's the 'nots' that would be key, here ... I should think.
"There are 11 kinds of people: those who know binary, those who don't, and those who could not care less!"
Bats don't depend on them at all as far as we can tell. Studies of the stomach contents of bats (and purple martins, another supposed mosquito abated) found less than 1% of their diet consists of mosquitoes. They just aren't nutrient dense - you'd have to eat a lot of mosquitoes to support the metabolism of a bat (flying mammals have high metabolisms). Insectivorous bats primarily eat moths and wasps. Mosquitoes are a rounding error in terms of their diet.
I should also note that the Oxitec technology is very targeted - it only affects one (Ae. aegypti) out of 3,500 mosquito species. Where it is currently being used (the Americas), that species in a non-native invasive species, introduced only in the last few decades. No native species at all depends on Ae. aegypti and they make up less than 1% of any American mosquito population.
It seems to me that unless this works quickly, there will be strong 'selection' against whatever they do.
That is, if you introduce a sex-switch gene to the population that pushes them away from femaleness, the ones without that gene are likely to out-breed the ones with it (since they have two genders able to breed), and this gene will fall off pretty quick.
Very interesting. Now if they can target the other species that feed on humans... I'm sure there will be plenty left of the species that only feed on plants, or not at all in the adult phase.
Ironic that some folks scream "GMO!" on the one hand, and ignore "invasive species" on the other...
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
uh...finds a way.