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.

Comments

Completely false, they are vital to the ecosystem.

[intellitech]

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.

...unless it already killed off a significant...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.