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."
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). "
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
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.
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.
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)
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.