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Florida District Considers Releasing GMO Mosquitos After Cayman Islands Experiment (accuweather.com)
It's already underway just 364 miles south of Florida, according to the Associated Press. "The first wave of genetically modified mosquitoes were released Wednesday in the Cayman Islands as part of a new effort to control the insect that spreads Zika and other viruses," according to an article shared by Slashdot reader Okian Warrior:
Genetically altered male mosquitoes, which don't bite but are expected to mate with females to produce offspring that die before reaching adulthood, were released in the West Bay area of Grand Cayman Island, according to a joint statement from the Cayman Islands Mosquito Research and Control Unit and British biotech firm Oxitec.
"What could possibly go wrong?" asks The Atlantic, citing history's great pest-control fails in Hawaii and Australia. But a similar release is already being considered in the Florida Keys, though Accuweather reports it apparently depends on the results of a November referendum which could also "affect the likelihood of Oxitec trials taking place in other parts of the United States."
"What could possibly go wrong?" asks The Atlantic, citing history's great pest-control fails in Hawaii and Australia. But a similar release is already being considered in the Florida Keys, though Accuweather reports it apparently depends on the results of a November referendum which could also "affect the likelihood of Oxitec trials taking place in other parts of the United States."
Limited.
These mosquitos can't bite people - they're males.
They can't reproduce due to their sterility.
The DNA can't transfer to other things because that bit of engineered DNA is very special purpose, and does not confer any significant fitness to anything.
This works by having mosquitos mate (which they do only with their own species), and having the developing eggs have developmental defects that lead to them dying in the egg. The female mosquito is otherwise unaffected, but dies after she lays the eggs, as she would normally.
The males are engineered to pass on a gene to their offspring. This gene kills the offspring.
So as to be able to raise them in the lab, the gene can be turned off by adding tetracycline to the food - an antibiotic.
If for some reason this fails in a small percentage of mosquitos - nothing happens other than normal mosquitos being produced.
But, in the vast majority of cases, the eggs are produced and during development, because there is no tetracycline (an antibiotic) in the environment, they die.
It is short-lived. The point is to breed lots of mosquitos, and release in an area. You continue doing this for several cycles, and significantly depress numbers of mosquitos in the area.
The mosquitos in principle are very cheap and easy to raise - you need to grow them in a very low-tech lab, with tetracycline in their food, and then sort by size before releasing them. (the large ones are females which you destroy).
You can actually exterminate species this way.
This has been done before. From http://www.fao.org/docrep/U422...
"USDA scientists next arranged a screwworm eradication experiment against a completely isolated population on the island of Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles. The island covers an area of 440 km and is 65 km from the coast of Venezuela. Screwworms were mass-reared in a facility near Orlando, Florida. Irradiated pupae were shipped by air to Curaçao, and the emerged flies were released by a single-engine plane flying 1.6 km wide swaths over the island. Each week 300 sterile flies were released per square kilometre during the eradication phase. Within less than six months from the initiation of the experiment, screwworms were eradicated from the island of Curaçao, in 1954 (Baumhover et al., 1955). "
Err - no. Tetracycline levels need to be really high. From memory, it's about .1% of the food.
There is nowhere in nature that this exists - apart perhaps from some third world pharmaceutical plant. Mere traces don't do it.
Aedes Egypti, the targeted mosquito, is not native to Florida and most places where it is found. This treatment targets this one species of mosquito. Florida and other places have their own native mosquito species. These species are not nearly as dangerous as Egypti. When we eradicate Aedes Egypti, the native mosquitos will take over the niches left and things would if anything be returned to their more natural state in these areas.