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Australian Experiment Wipes Out Over 80% of Disease-Carrying Mosquitoes (cnn.com)
schwit1 quotes CNN: In an experiment with global implications, Australian scientists have successfully wiped out more than 80% of disease-carrying mosquitoes in trial locations across north Queensland.
The experiment, conducted by scientists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization and James Cook University (JCU), targeted Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which spread deadly diseases such as dengue fever and Zika. In JCU laboratories, researchers bred almost 20 million mosquitoes, infecting males with bacteria that made them sterile. Then, last summer, they released over three million of them in three towns on the Cassowary Coast.
The sterile male mosquitoes didn't bite or spread disease, but when they mated with wild females, the resulting eggs didn't hatch, and the population crashed.
The experiment, conducted by scientists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization and James Cook University (JCU), targeted Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which spread deadly diseases such as dengue fever and Zika. In JCU laboratories, researchers bred almost 20 million mosquitoes, infecting males with bacteria that made them sterile. Then, last summer, they released over three million of them in three towns on the Cassowary Coast.
The sterile male mosquitoes didn't bite or spread disease, but when they mated with wild females, the resulting eggs didn't hatch, and the population crashed.
completly... mosquito's are food and this just destroy's food
The mosquito population seems to be doing just fine. Why look, there's two of them right there hovering over my screen, right now! Oh, wait, those aren't small bugs, those are erroneous, misplaced apostrophes. If only we could invent a bacteria that would kill off the use of the possessive form when people actually mean to use the plural form. It would make their, "Here, I'm informed and intelligent - let me tell you why you're wrong on this topic!" scolds feel a lot more credible.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
So this year the population is down 80%, the next year it'll be down another 60%... but the following year 100% of the mosquito population will be immune, and there will be 10000% more of them because the bird population decreased 80% from starvation. To challenge nature on it's own terms is generally futile in the long run.
There are lots of other things for birds to eat. Also, bats eat many more mosquitoes than birds and there are many other insects for bats to eat.
Also, the mosquitoes they are eradicating were not a native species in Australia. So presumably the birds were fine eating native insects before this particular breed was introduced.
1. Immune to what? Females would have to know that the male is sterile and only select non-sterile males, that is pretty hard task to do with just random mutation during a couple of generations. And even if they do figure out a way, all would just reset back to where it started. And there is no reason why scientists couldn't come up with a counter measure to that. But in other similar experiments they have not seen any immunity.
2. You are making up numbers. Birds will do fine without that food source. Actual scientists that actually study birds have confirmed that, because this arguments comes up every time.
3. To challenge nature is futile? You are talking to a species that has already wiped out hundreds of other species.
Not every mosquito is native to every area, and not every insect is a major and irreplaceable part of the food system.
Humans have messed up every ecosystem on the planet, eliminated more species than we even keep track of, but try to eradicate one pest, even one which is an introduced vector of disease even to the native animals in some places, and suddenly you've gone too far? Baloney. If ecosystems were so fragile they could't handle the loss of one more exceptionally problematic pest, they would have collapsed a long time ago.
And that 'nature will find a way' crap? Tell that to the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo, the moa, the quagga, steller's sea cow, or plenty of other less famous organisms. Tell that to the Hawaiian honeycreepers, which are currently being wiped out by avian malaria, spread by human introduced mosquitoes. Maybe tell that to the baiji or the totoaba, they could use the encouragement.