Slashdot Mirror
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."
Unless the released mosquitoes are replenished, their offspring will not perpetuate the cycle and so this trial won't last long. I'm not sure how plausible this would be, but it would be much better to release modified mosquitoes who's offspring are all male. This would then eradicate this species of mosquito.
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's probably significantly easier to produce them. All the have to do with these genetically modified mosquitoes is provide tetracycline to them, and their eggs will hatch as normal. Once the tetracycline is taken away, the eggs they produce will not be able to grow. This leads to another interesting possibility, which I would think would be much, much more effective (and probably controversial). That is to distribute tetracycline over a large area, like by dusting it, while simultaneously introducing the genetically modified mosquitoes (both male and female). They will mate and reproduce, ideally for a week or so, as long as the tetracycline holds out. Once it has decomposed then none of the offspring will survive. Because a number of generations could breed naturally and have intermixed during that time, the effects on the population would be far more devastating.
Better known as 318230.
Why not just nuke them from orbit? It's the only way to be sure.
Because they are not sexy enough. Seriously. The female mosquitos do not want to mate with them, so they don't make much impact.
But what I'm curious about is why don't they use the GMO mosquitos that only have male descendents. That would quickly bring the species to extinction.
entropy happens
The general population should just shut their fucking mouths when they feel like spewing an "opinion" about something.
Then why don't you starting by setting a good example?
Science is a process and is hard.
That's why it's perfectly fine for people to voice concerns when they start experimenting in the wild. It's not like we have a perfect overview of how significantly reducing these mosquito populations will affect all other animals that feed on them (and the animals that feed on those, plants that depend on their excrement etc), just to name one potential unintended side effect. Or how it may allow other animals to largely expand their population due to reduced competition for habitats or food sources (mosquitos generally don't survive on blood, that's just what they need for procreation). Or conversely, certain nutrients no longer getting sufficiently removed from the water by mosquito larvae, resulting on too high concentrations of certain substances that then start killing other animals or plants.
TL;DR: Voice educated questions about scientific stuff. Do not broadcast uninformed opinions derived from your safe spot.
If anything is anti-science, it's trying to pre-emptively paint any debate by the general public as uninformed hipster trash. Because that is how you create luddites: by telling people they don't have a say, can't possibly understand anything about the ramifications, and should shut up and defer to some abstract scientists in ivory towers on the authority of some anonymous coward throwing a tantrum.
Donate free food here
False equivalence much?
Asking for Long-Term Studies, aka Show me the data is not anti-science. Where is the data for the 5, 10, 20, and 40+ year environmental impact?
For every "problem" technology promises to fix it almost always raises 2 more problems.
All you've done is trade one dogma for another. Healthy Skepticism helps keep blind faith (in Science) in check.
My city drops larvicide down all the storm sewers three times a year in order to prevent West Nile Virus. (We've had no cases here and no positive tests in mosquitoes either this year.) So the bugs are gone and the job is done. But the flies are the worst they have been in at least 12 yeast (I can't say any further because I've only lived in this house for 12 years). The problem is that there are no predators in my suburb to eat flying insects anymore. Before the city started dropping the larvicide down the storm sewers there were plenty of swifts, purple martins, bats, and other flying animals that would eat insects. There was only parcel of land where some swifts managed to live until a last year when houses started being built on it. Now none of those animals exist in the suburb. The city could have encouraged more of those birds and bats to thrive here by giving away homes for them. It would have been cheaper in the long run instead of having to apply chemicals three times a year, every year.
Now we are seeing parts of the city where insect populations are getting out of control because there are no predators around. The city has to respond with chemicals because that's the only response left to them. The ecosystem is much more complex than what you think, even if you think it's complex. This plan isn't just taking out a particular insect. It has a purpose in the web or else it would exist.
Also, there is literally no way that the spread of Zika will stop, so efforts like these are silly.
Care to explain why? If we reduce the population of mosquitoes enough Zika will not spread. It is as simple as that.
And come on, there exist no animal whose diet consists exclusively of Aedes Aegypti. If we eliminate it, they will just eat other mosquitoes instead. It is not as if there is any lack of mosquitoes in the wild.
entropy happens
It either won't reduce the mosquito issue, or it will collapse the mosquito population and have a cascade effect on all the animals that rely on them, and those that rely on the previous ones, and so on.
Other than that, really nothing can go wrong.
They are genetically modified to be unable to successfully reproduce.
(And if somebody says "Life will find a way", since that would require it actually surviving to a new generation, I will hunt you down and beat you to extinction with a T-Rex bone to prove the point!) (Yeah, ok, I don't actually hurt anyone, but I hope you found the comment humorous / humerus since extinction proves the quote isn't true in the first place.)
but some facts are just facts, and some batshit crazy ideas are just plain flat batshit crazy ideas.
"Things fall on Earth because gravity."
"I don't like this gravity of yours. You are a shill for Big Physics?"
See how this doesn't work?
"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong." (Oscar Wilde)
Don't know what will happen to animals that eat mosquitoes. I guess we'll collapse that food chain when we come to it...
They are not trying to wipe out all mosquitoes, just the varieties that spread disease. There are plenty of species of mosquitoes that are not vectors for any human diseases, and they can fill the same niche.
But what I'm curious about is why don't they use the GMO mosquitos that only have male descendents. That would quickly bring the species to extinction.
That a much harder genetic engineering problem. It also involves having the GMO organism reproducing in the wild, which will make regulations and environmental assessments much more difficult.
They were one of my clients for many years, until I sold my company about ten years ago. They are almost certainly the most sophisticated and technically capable mosquito control operation in the world, and I've worked with hundreds of them.
Many visitors to the Keys are unaware of the potential for a hellish mosquito problem there. This is not a natural situation. There are few places that have such a concentration of prime mosquito habitat next to dense human populations. If the Florida Keys Mosquito District simply stopped doing mosquito stopped doing mosquito control, I am confident that within a year the problem would be so bad that keys would be largely depopulated. Tourists, even many residents remain blissfully unaware of this because FKMCD is also one of the most effective district anywhere.
One of the reasons the FKMCD is so effective is it has been willing to try things that nobody else has ever done. For example they did a study of how well common pesticides actually work on the mosquitoes in their district. You'd think every district would do this routinely; after all it's pointless to spend money on pesticides your mosquitoes are resistant to, but nobody does it but FKMCD. The way most agencies choose pesticides is they go with the cheapest one. And if that doesn't work, they use more of it. FKMCD *knows* what works in their district, and how much they need to use. When you spend a million and a half bucks a year on pesticides, this is a big deal: in saving money, in reducing environmental impacts, and in keeping people from getting bit.
FKMCD has put a huge amount of investment into rapid response. Usually when a district goes out to spray an area it's in response to information that they received days, or even weeks earlier. This is not cost effective because usually the problem will have run its course by then; the mosquitoes just aren't there, they're somewhere else. In the Keys if you see a spray truck you can be sure it is being directed from data that is about twelve hours old. Since fogging has to be done in the wee hours of the morning, this is the theoretical limit for how quickly you can respond to information you receive during the day. Faster and more targeted response was the major focus of my work with them, and they paid me a lot of money to achieve success at that. It was money well spent, if I do say so myself.
This cost-is-no-object approach enabled FKMCD to achieve things that other districts can only dream of. On the other hand, it has its downsides. You could argue that the agency doesn't have to be quite as vigilant as it is, and that its success was fostering a cavalier attitude about ratepayer money. A few years ago the second-in-command was caught giving a company phone to his wife and daughter, something which did immense reputational harm to the district.
Also across Florida in the 2010s there was a movement by Tea Party to gain control of local government boards. The "Mosquitoeers" campaigned against sitting mosquito control board members by linking them with Obama, and this proved successful, even in the Keys. The results, according to the people I stay in contact with, is that spray missions have had to be curtailed because of vehicles with worn tires, or even running low on pesticides -- something that was unheard of ten years ago. They've also had management turnover -- their long-term and very experienced director retired and the replacement left after a few short years.
Still, if there's any district that can do this pilot project and track the effectiveness of the results, it's FKMCD. It is the ideal place to try it. And you just can't go off half-cocked in the Keys either, because Federal regulators watch the place like a hawk. Hopefully this represents a turn to a more balanced approach -- still aggressive and innovative, but a little more cost conscious.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.