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Google's Life Sciences Unit Is Releasing 20 Million Bacteria-Infected Mosquitoes in Fresno (techcrunch.com)
Earlier this week, a white Mercedes Sprinter van began a delivery route along the streets of Fancher Creek, a residential neighborhood on the southeastern edge of Fresno, California. Its cargo? 100,000 live mosquitoes, all male, all incapable of producing offspring. As it crisscrossed Fancher Creek's 200 acres, it released its payload, piping out swarms of sterile Aedes aegypti into the air. It'll do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, from now until the end of December. From a report: Verily, the life science's arm of Google's parent company Alphabet, has hatched a plan to release about 20 million lab-made, bacteria-infected mosquitoes upon Fresno, California -- and that's a good thing! You see, the Zika-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquito is prevalent in the area. Earlier this year, a woman contracted the first confirmed case of Zika in Fresno through sexual contact with a partner who had been traveling. Now there's the fear of the inevitable mosquito-meets-patient if we don't do something about it. Verily's plan, called the Debug Project, hopes to now wipe out this potential Zika-carrying mosquito population to prevent further infections.
On the one hand, I think that mosquitos should be intentionally driven to extinction. At least the disease baring ones. My understanding is that they don't occupy a vital niche in the food-chain or otherwise in the ecosystem.
On the other hand, I find unregulated ecological engineering by a private company to be quite creepy.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Summary is missing the important bit.
Verily’s male mosquitoes were infected with the Wolbachia bacteria, which is harmless to humans, but when they mate with and infect their female counterparts, it makes their eggs unable to produce offspring.
Better known as 318230.
That's a lot of damn bugs. How does one go about breeding 20 million mosquitoes? Maybe more importantly, how do you separate out the ladies from the gents?
My understanding is that they don't occupy a vital niche in the food-chain or otherwise in the ecosystem.
Google is your friend. I knew the answer to this already, but was surprised by how readily available source material was to support my response.
A few notable items:
http://www.nature.com/news/201...
http://io9.gizmodo.com/what-if...
http://science.howstuffworks.c...
https://www.theguardian.com/gl...
Etc.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
"the Wolbachia bacteria, which is harmless to humans"
How many times have we been told "it's harmless" only to learn that was not the case ?
Too many times to count, is the correct answer if you've been paying attention in your classes in the real world.
...the TSA does in their spare time?
I think it's pretty well established that life tends to gravitate toward that which will propagate life.
I think we collective don't really stand much of a chance against nature's natural selection.
In the short term, this may reduce mosquitoes, but long term? Probably not. It won't take long for nature to teach the female mosquito to avoid males that don't procreate properly. But this is one case where I hope I'm wrong. I hate those things!
What is going on with the site and where is BeauHD?
The servers for the site and BeauHD have been attacked by a pack of insanely bloodthirsty mosquitoes from Fresno ...
Mosquitoes being eliminated everywhere would have no negative effect on the ecosystems. Mosquitoes aren't a significant food source for any animals and well they are just blood sucking disease carriers.
You can't be bothered to even read your fscking links? From http://www.nature.com/news/201...
Eradicating any organism would have serious consequences for ecosystems — wouldn't it? Not when it comes to mosquitoes, finds Janet Fang.
From TFA:
Could messing with the mosquito population have some unforeseen disastrous consequences? Not likely. This particular mosquito species entered the area in 2013.
This is very important information, I think. We're just dealing with another invasive species here. Nothing will be harmed by wiping out this local population. It can't possibly be a critical link in the local ecosystem over such a short period of time.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
NOW THAT'S A SAUSAGE FEST!
I think it's pretty well established that life tends to gravitate toward that which will propagate life.
I think we collective don't really stand much of a chance against nature's natural selection.
In the short term, this may reduce mosquitoes, but long term? Probably not. It won't take long for nature to teach the female mosquito to avoid males that don't procreate properly. But this is one case where I hope I'm wrong. I hate those things!
Possibly, but also possibly not.
The US South used to be subject to screw worm fly, a parasite that lays eggs in open sores of livestock and humans. It's been eradicated using the strategy in the OP - many irradiated male screw worms were released into the wild, who would mate with the females, but the eggs would not hatch.
Each time the male flies are released, the probability of successful mating goes down a little. Keep releasing the flies over time, and the probabilities become progressively less and less.
Mathematically speaking the reproductive probabilities never reach zero, but you reach a point where the discrete nature of the insects comes into play. When the last female in an area dies, there is no recovery.
Screw worms have been eliminated from the US for several decades using this method, and the technique has been generally proven as safe. In the irradiation method, you're not releasing anything into the environment that wasn't already there.
Aedes aegypti is becoming resistant to insecticides, and carries the Zika virus.
If you can make the population crash to zero it won't recover, short of reintroducing it.
I'm looking forward to the time when we can start eradicating some of these pests from the world, such as the Anopheles mosquito in the US (which is not native), mongooses in Hawaii, or cane toads in Australia.
how does that invalidate what OP said?
I wonder how they KNOW all the mosquitoes are infected, or that 5% of them aren't immune to the bacteria and they're just breeding super mosquitoes. I'm sure they've thought about this, but there still has to be a certain amount of risk involved in this type of venture. Like a great mathematician once said.. "Life finds a way". He also explained chaos theory in a fairly creepy way.
portion of the native population currently filling that niche.
Something people often forget about invasive species: If they displace enough of the native flora/fauna in the ecosystem, then removing them could in fact lead to a crash of the native population when the predating species decimate the native population as a result of the loss of the displacing species as a food source and the overabundance of the predator species.
The result of which might be the loss of the invasive species, the invaded species, and any higher species in the foodchain which rely on it as/to feed higher food chain animals.
On the one hand, I think that mosquitos should be intentionally driven to extinction. At least the disease baring ones. My understanding is that they don't occupy a vital niche in the food-chain or otherwise in the ecosystem.
On the other hand, I find unregulated ecological engineering by a private company to be quite creepy.
Don't be.
They're not eradicating *all* mosquitoes, and no one is suggesting that we eventually do that.
Aedes aegypti are not native to the area, and first appeared in 2013. Anopheles, the ones that bite humans, are not native to North America.
There are a couple of hundred species of mosquito and we're only targeting the ones that cause us harm, and the ones that are not native.
The other species will re-expand to fill the empty niches.
While this batch of bacterially infected mosquitos will (hopefully) induce a short term (months? years?) drop in the population, a "technical" fix for permanently solving this problem worldwide now exists.
It is called "Gene Drive" if you haven't heard of it and what it utilizes is the powerful genetic editing technique called CRISPR. Basically you alter the genes of a male mosquitos so it carries the CRISPR gene package so that all of its children are male. Then, the included CRISPR package in the genome alters all of THEIR genes so that all of their children are male (and carries the package forward).
The population because more and more male "dominated" until there are no females left. Then poof!, after one last generation, they're gone.
While the deliberate (we're doing it all the time accidentally) elimination of a species is obviously something that shouldn't be done lightly, since THIS particular species carries Malaria, Dengue Fever, West Nile virus and Zika it would seem to b a prime target. Bill Gates, after his foundation spent several hundred million dollars trying to eradicate Malaria says he's all for it because he thinks it may be the only way to wipe out some of these terrible scourges (millions of dead children). It appears as if New Zealand will try this technique to get rid of an invasive species, a mammal(!) introduced by European settlers; the mouse. (If successful they plan to continue doing this to many other invasive species).
https://www.technologyreview.c...
Of course it would be the height of irony if a mosquito managed to transfer the CRISPR gene package (from itself or a mouse) to its main host, thus getting rid of the most invasive species in Earth's history: US
The fact that Google, a company whose sole purpose is to fuck people over to make money, has a "life sciences division" is way scarier than any mosquito.
On July 14th, 2017, Google released 20 million mosquitoes purposely infected with the Wolbachia bacteria. Evolution took over, and as this bacteria moved up the food chain, it also mutated and began causing sterility in other species. Once it infected the avian population, it quickly spread world-wide.
On July 4th, 2019, the last baby for all species was born on Earth. Happy Independence Day, plant kingdom!
...or is this just an Alphabet company deciding they know better than we do what is good for us.
Mosquitos infected with Wolbachia are regulated as pesticides, and need a permit for release.
Genetically modified mosquitos are regulated by the FDA, and it is a lot tougher to get a permit.
Lookup Mosquito Dry Fly. A favorite food of trout everywhere. I wore a ski jacket, a netted hat, and 3/4 finger gloves and sprayed my clothes with DEET and still got bit.
Rather than hit or (LIKELY) miss on that, just put the infected women in a bubble. Keep her in there. Send Travolta by every now and then to keep up her spirits. Or was that Benson? Karla, you there - OR WHAT?
live mosquitoes, all male, all incapable of producing offspring. The kind of control you're attempting simply is... it's not possible. If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh... well, there it is.
Because it has already been quite well demonstrated that these methods, while they sound convincing, dont actually work.
Why? good old natural selection.
The few females that can resist the Wolbachia bacteria (the infection being carried that is effective) will be the ones that breed.
And quite likely they will produce more resistant females, and males.
Very soon, the population is back, and now resistant to that vector.
Already well demonstrated in trials, but the modern way is not to research, its just to do, and assume you know best.
live mosquitoes, all male, all incapable of producing offspring.
The kind of control you're attempting simply is... it's not possible. If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh... well, there it is.
You're confusing "life" with "a species". Species die out all the time.
Also, you do realize you're quoting a movie as fact, right?
**rim-shot
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
Hayward? I once turned down a scholarship to Cal State Hayward because, like, fuck Hayward, man.
So, genocide is OK under certain circumstances, as long as it makes life a tad bit more convenient for ourselves. I'll notify the UN.
Genocide is defined as the killing of a large group of people, especially an ethnic group or nation.
Also, feel free to notify the UN that you think genocide is OK under certain circumstances. Be sure to use your real name.
They're not eradicating *all* mosquitoes, and no one is suggesting that we eventually do that.
Actually, I would suggest we do just that.
Mosquitoes are part of the food chain, bats eat them.
There no real need to remove the ones that don't bother us, so why go to all the trouble?
Actually, I've always thought that, insofar as the mosquito/malaria can be thought to have a 'role' in evolutionary theory, then its role is to keep the human population under control.
It didn't. Move on.
We don't need to kill all of them, just those that suck blood from humans (and possibly also those that suck blood from other animals). We would still have 3000 species left.
I doubt I am the only one to spot the similarity;-)
My understanding is that they don't occupy a vital niche in the food-chain or otherwise in the ecosystem.
Google is your friend. I knew the answer to this already, but was surprised by how readily available source material was to support my response.
A few notable items:
http://www.nature.com/news/201... http://io9.gizmodo.com/what-if... http://science.howstuffworks.c... https://www.theguardian.com/gl...
Etc.
You were surprised? Yeah, I was too, particularly as to the data you provided, since I believe the point you were trying to make is mosquitoes are necessary and vital to our ecosystem.
Some of your articles hint that eradication would not create an ecological impact. Some also stated that eradication efforts are "not worth it unless there was a very serious public health emergency."
Perhaps the true question is how many humans will have to become infected or die until the latter statement rings true?
Perhaps we look at history to answer that. The mosquito has long been known as the deadliest animal on the planet. They have killed countless humans through the ages. It carries over a dozen diseases, including malaria, which still kills over a million people every year. Now Zika has been added to that infamous list.
Sad when you consider the innocent victims of Zika are babies suffering from microcephaly. The fear of that affliction alone is a form of terrorism when it comes to people wanting to start a family. Imagine the other impacts of areas known to be Zika-prone. Think your home value would not plummet if they found a 300% increase of Zika cases in your zip code? Impact local business that rely on humans being outside but now aren't due to increased fear of infection? I'm willing to bet it would. Much like the global concerns surrounding the Ebola outbreaks a few years ago, humans can get rather panicky when it comes to increased chances of being exposed to a life-threatening disease. Perhaps rightly so.
It would appear that we are doing something now to counter the threat, likely because enough revenue is at risk. Efforts have to be financially justified when it comes to preventing harm or death these days. If we do nothing in response to increased risk, then the mosquito will simply stand as yet another form of population control.
Hummm... So the bacteria in the male mosquito makes the female eggs 'unable to reproduce' and is 'harmless to humans.' ...wonder what about the steps in the food chain in between?
....oh ...wait...
http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/Antibiotic-Resistance-Mutation-Rates-and-MRSA-28360/
At least we've never seen bacteria mutate
Nobody is trying to kill all the mosquitoes. There are 3500 known species of mosquitoes. If one particular species, Aedes Aegypti, goes missing nobody will notice - other than due to the fact that yellow fever doesn't happen again. With 3500+ species some of them go extinct all the time, and nobody notices. Speciation creates new species too; we won't be running out any time soon.
Not sure which is the greater bloodsucking threat. Mosquitoes or Google with it's data sucking. I'm also not sure which will be harder to eradicate.
It is also a non-native species which got here once, why would it not just get here again?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The benefit is that the existance of the Wolbachia virus in the mozquito reduces the ability of the Dengue and Zika viruses to infect the it, reducing transmission.
Now, resistance among Dengue and Zika virus strains is a different matter - but where they are largely being used, where the infections are not endemic, but imported - the virus won't be exposed to Wolbachia for long enough for that to happen. But we'll have to see how this goes in area where these viruses are endemic.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
And I am more often told, by some ignorant enviromentalist, that something clearly and obviously safe is dangerous, than being told by researchers that something is safe before long experience and epidemiology find it problematic. The later is something that happens a few times a generation, the former is two-thirds of the internet
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
But there are a small number of species that carry human disease. These could safely be eliminated, and their ecological niche would be filled by similar species that don't carry human diseases.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
You're entirely wrong about the necessity of catching every (or a significant fraction) of an entire generation of mosquito.
That is the entire point of the gene drive: it "drives" its genes throughout the population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It does this by copying itself to new chromosomes whenever it can, thus, when sexual reproduction occurs, BOTH sets of chromosomes (or some high fraction) passed onto the next generation carries the gene, not just ONE.
Every (or most) mosquito descended from one with this gene will give this gene to EVERY (most) mosquito generated from it instead of 1/2. This is FAR different from standard sexual reproduction (1/2). Model this interaction mathematically (and refer to my link) and you will see that within about 20 generations, 100% of the targeted population will carry the gene. And that will be the last generation. (Yes, there are some caveats, such as a male carrying this gene has to be as (or nearly as ) reproductively fit as a male that does not.
--PeterM
--PeterM
Just a little correction - while these Aedes aegypti mosquitoes do carry Dengue, Zika and West Nile, they don't spread malaria. That is left to a range of different mosquito species in the Anopheles genus.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
It is true that all these infected male mosquitoes cannot produce offspring, but that's not the important part. They are being released to infect the female population. When infected, the female mosquitoes can breed, producing infected offspring, and infected females don't then later get infected with Dengue.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
With a species like mosquito, I wonder if you can really contain a gene drive.
If you use it to wipe out a local population, well, if some individuals with the gene drive make it out of that local population back to the "main" population, the main population is going to see dominance of that gene as well.
Because of this, I would rather see gene drive used like this, where possible: instead of wiping out the local population of Anopheles mosquito, you drive a gene that makes that mosquito incapable of carrying disease. Then, in 20 or so generations, you have a population that is incapable of carrying disease but is otherwise fine. If your gene drive escapes its intended bounds, well, the worldwide population is incapable of carrying that disease and that disease is eradicated.
--PeterM
That's teleological reasoning (malaria knows nothing of human populations, and humans weren't a "problem" when malaria first evolved), but even if it were valid, it wouldn't work for us.
I really hope English is not your first language. If it isn't, I can forgive you the horrible grammar and spelling (I can't say anything else like "you're at least trying" because I don't have any way to gauge your progress).
But if it is.. my god man, go back to school!
Read the footnotes. Universities, Government agencies, research institutes. Where are the private companies doing this? Why should they be allowed to do so with a free hand? How about the the consent of the people who live there? What if I don't want to be bitten by your experiment? You say it's harmless? So Fucking What, I didn't sign up for that shit. Someone needs to watch Jurassic Park.
I don't see what could possibly go wrong here. Hope the bacteria itself isn't mutatable.
Let's destroy one of the bases of the ecosystem, I am pretty sure it won't affect the rest of the ecosystem.
Surely we'll have deployed mosquito-killing-laser-firing robots by then.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
In many areas mosquitoes are invasive species. For instance, mosquitoes are not native to the Hawaiian Islands, and they are a threat to many native bird species and plants that have no evolutionary adaptation to mosquitoes. So these birds and plants are more susceptible to being replaced by other invasive species that can better tolerate mosquitoes.
Wiping out mosquitoes in Hawaii would be an unqualified good thing.
Surely we'll have deployed mosquito-killing-laser-firing robots by then.
We already have mosquito killing laser firing robots but so far the cost is too high and the range too low for wide deployment. The projected use is for defense of high value targets, such as clinics and hospitals, rather than wide area denial.
What could possibly go wrong?
It's always a little awkward when you make what you think is a rather obvious joke, and someone responds seriously.
That's fine, I'll answer seriously: If this is successful even temporarily, there's nothing to prevent Google or anyone else from applying the same treatment again in the future, if necessary, perhaps even more aggressively, and combined with better quarantine procedures in the future. Then again, it may actually wipe out the viability of the local population to a degree that future treatments are rarely if ever needed.
Honestly, I have no idea which way it will go, but it seems like an experiment worth trying. Even without the laser-firing robots.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
It is also a non-native species which got here once, why would it not just get here again?
The TSA will keep them out this time.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Honestly, I have no idea which way it will go, but it seems like an experiment worth trying. Even without the laser-firing robots.
It's pretty much a self limiting experiment. Sterility in one area won't affect the whole world, and if people want to re-introduce the little buggers they can.
What so many people don't understand is that many places would be just about unlivable without control methods. The nice thing about this control method is that it doesn't involve neurotoxins.
Hopefully this will work out and they can extend this sort of eradication to ticks. For my money they are worse than mosquitoes. In my area we had a real bad tick problem a few years ago. Something had decimated the mouse population, and the ticks turned to humans to get their blood meals.
The concerns are the effect on the possum population, who feed on ticks - maybe an alternative control program there? Anyhow, I for one welcome the experiment.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Sounds like the plot line of the next zombie movie.
We thought we were helping humanity. It was supposed to eliminate the zika virus. It started with the mutated rage skeeters. However once the human hosts got infected, things got bad, very bad. Living on an apiary we though we were protected, we had suits... but what was to follow was, well worse. There is word that Google Corp has save zone, we're not sure where it is, but we're going to try and find it... Wish us luck...