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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.
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.
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.
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
Bats are opportunistic feeders and while mosquitoes are a part of their diet they aren't a major part compared to larger insects. The elimination of disease carrying mosquitoes will not have a major impact on bats. They are not the main food source by any means and only make up a small part of their diet.
"studies of bats in the wild have shown that they consume mostly beetles, wasps, moths, and these same studies have shown that mosquitoes make up less than 1 percent of their total diet."
http://www.wbrcouncil.org/Depa...
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