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Google Has a Plan To Eliminate Mosquitoes Around the World (bloombergquint.com)
Zorro shares a report: Silicon Valley researchers are attacking flying bloodsuckers in California's Fresno County. It's the first salvo in an unlikely war for Google parent Alphabet: eradicating mosquito-borne diseases around the world. A white high-top Mercedes van winds its way through the suburban sprawl and strip malls as a swarm of male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes shoot out of a black plastic tube on the passenger-side window. These pests are tiny and, with a wingspan of just a few millimeters, all but invisible. "You hear that little beating sound?" says Kathleen Parkes, a spokesperson for Verily Life Sciences, a unit of Alphabet. She's trailing the van in her car, the windows down. "Like a duh-duh-duh? That's the release of the mosquitoes."
Jacob Crawford, a Verily senior scientist riding with Parkes, begins describing a mosquito-control technique with dazzling potential. These particular vermin, he explains, were bred in the ultra-high-tech surroundings of Verily's automated mosquito rearing system, 200 miles away in South San Francisco. They were infected with Wolbachia, a common bacterium. When those 80,000 lab-bred Wolbachia-infected, male mosquitoes mate with their counterpart females in the wild, the result is stealth annihilation: the offspring never hatch. Better make that 79,999. "One just hit the windshield," says Crawford. Mosquito-borne disease eradication is serious stuff for Alphabet, though it is just one of many of the company's forays into health care and life sciences.
Jacob Crawford, a Verily senior scientist riding with Parkes, begins describing a mosquito-control technique with dazzling potential. These particular vermin, he explains, were bred in the ultra-high-tech surroundings of Verily's automated mosquito rearing system, 200 miles away in South San Francisco. They were infected with Wolbachia, a common bacterium. When those 80,000 lab-bred Wolbachia-infected, male mosquitoes mate with their counterpart females in the wild, the result is stealth annihilation: the offspring never hatch. Better make that 79,999. "One just hit the windshield," says Crawford. Mosquito-borne disease eradication is serious stuff for Alphabet, though it is just one of many of the company's forays into health care and life sciences.
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Zika wasn't a problem in South America until the Sharks lost the Stanley Cup in seven games.
Sure, where these are not native, eliminating them not too long after they turn up is probably not going to kill anything else. But where they are native, somethings will hunt them and they may have other functions. In the worst case, you get a chain reaction and a lot of things change. This may well make the situation worse.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
But we can't adequately keep track of variables in software we've written.
Isn't it perhaps a tad presumptuous to think that we've taken into account all the variables in our reverse engineering of nature? I appreciate this mindset would mean no progress - but perhaps a halfway house, where we're not... yanno... attempting to make a massive modification, like "killing off an entire species"?
Depends on the numbers and the details. Usually these world-improvers are bright eyed hacks that get it wrong and make things worse, sometimes massively so.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Do you want fewer mosquitoes, for at least a little while, or not?
If so, shaddup!
No, I'd rather maintain a reasonable amount of biodiversity.
If mosquitoes went extinct: Mosquito larvae are very important in aquatic ecology. Many other insects and small fish feed on them and the loss of that food source would cause their numbers to decline as well. Anything that feeds on them, such as game fish, raptorial birds, etc. would in turn suffer too. Mosquitoes can be wiped out but the ecological damage that would be necessary (draining swamps/wetlands, applying pesticides over wide areas), along with strict regulatory enforcement, would make eradication not worth it unless there was a very serious public health emergency.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
> Zika wasn't a problem in South America until genetically modified mosquito were released in Brazil.
That smells like bullshit. Got any proof other than a random tinfoil shoutout from an anonymous coward account? Doing a few searches shows that this sounds like a new wingnut talking point, ignoring actual facts.
a) The people doing that were definitely not bright-eyed hacks.
b) Nothing else depends on Polio and Smallpox being there. Eradicating a disease and eradicating a species are two very different things.
Knowledge on your side needed, not a citation.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
this exactly.
There are many cases where humans introducing something or removing something has had a severe negative impact on ecosystems, causing us to further mess with the ecosystem to try and mitigate the issues caused by our mitigations.
Hawaii and mongoose is a very easy obvious one,and there are many many more like that.
Yes, they thought about it for longer than you did, evidently.
They are wiping out 1 specific species of mosquitoes. Other species are not impacted. Assuming the other species have the same food sources and life cycles, they'll simply replace the species that have been wiped out and no food webs will be wiped out.
You don't have to wipe out all mosquito species to eliminate the ones that spread human disease... I think there are only 6 or so that bite humans. Many of them would be considered invasive species in the Americas. These techniques are actually more selective than spraying and draining wetlands, which are the historical methods of mosquito control.
To quote myself from above: You don't have to wipe out all mosquito species to eliminate the ones that spread human disease... I think there are only 6 or so that bite humans. Many of them would be considered invasive species in the Americas. These techniques are actually more selective than spraying and draining wetlands, which are the historical methods of mosquito control.
Zika was first identified in humans in early 50s. It in was identified in South American in 2007, long before the modified mesquito experiment.
I hate fat people.
Has Google given any thought to what eliminating mosquitoes does to the food chain? Bats eat them. Some birds eat them. I'd guess that spiders eat them. What happens to the creatures who have a (potentially) major source of their food just disappear?
There are 3500 known species of mosquito. This plan is going after aedes aegypti, which feeds primarily on humans. Most other species of mosquitos (many of whom cohabitate with aedes aegypti) do not feed on humans. The food chain will do just fine with 3499 species instead of 3500.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Ya but then the gorillas will just die when winter comes along...
this exactly.
No, not at all. The targeted species, Aedes aegypti, is African, and IS NOT NATIVE TO CALIFORNIA. So there should be no negative repercussions from wiping it out. There are plenty of native species of mosquitoes (which are not disease vectors) that will be happy to fill the vacated niche.
Although the targeted A. aegypti will develop resistance, in the meantime, the temporary drop in their population may be enough to disrupt the spread of diseases. The spread of vector-borne diseases goes down as the reciprocal of the square of the vector population. For many of these diseases, R0 is already less than one, so this may be a way to lick'em for good.
Hawaii and mongoose is a very easy obvious one ...
Before the arrival of Europeans, Hawaii had zero mosquitoes. All the mosquitoes there should be wiped out. Then we can start working on the mongooses.
For the record, they're targeting Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, not Anopheles which is the species which carries malaria. Ae aegypti carry yellow fever virus, dengue virus chikungunya virus and Zika viruses. Interestingly Ae aegypti are considered invasive species originally native to Asia. So eradicating them, really shouldn't impact the environment.
Doubtful. They are mosquitos. Why wouldn't they best understand the impact of wiping them?
If you ask any biologist, the consensus is that if every mosquito worldwide dropped dead, nothing significant would happen to any biological systems. They're just a nuisance.
I have plenty of mosquitoes to spare. Just give me and address and I'll mail you a few tubes full of them.
"Wiping it out" implies globally, not just in California.
A bacteria borne disease is not going to "wipe out" Aedes aegypti. It is very robust and adaptable species. They can breed in an overturned bottle cap.
But if we knock the population back, it gives us breathing room to target the diseases. If there are a million cases of mosquito borne disease every year, very few resources can be devoted to each outbreak. But if we eliminate 90% of the mosquitoes, the result is a 99% reduction in the spread of the disease. That means we can devote much more personnel and resources to pounce on each outbreak.
This is what happened with smallpox. Once we got it 99% gone, we had fast-reaction teams of dozens of people, that would fly in to each outbreak, and then fan out to vaccinate everyone in the vicinity, and quarantine those likely to have been exposed. The last case in the wild was in Somalia in 1973.
I would rather a CRISPR-produced variety of mosquito that does not suck blood.
That is not a realistic goal. The female (only females suck blood) use the protein from the blood to make eggs. Non-blood-suckers would be at a reproductive disadvantage, and the modified gene would die out instead of spreading through the population.
A better goal is CRISPR-produced mosquitoes that don't transmit diseases. This would be no disadvantage to the mosquito, so would not die out.
And once we have proven this technique with mosquitoes, we can try it on humans.
Blood sucking human females are not a problem everywhere. Some countries don't have alimony.
Before the arrival of Europeans, Hawaii had zero mosquitoes.
As well as zero Europeans.
All the mosquitoes there should be wiped out.
D'oh!
There are so many species that depend on mosquito larvae for survival. Alphabet is being colossally irresponsible here. Are they going to create some alternative food for fish, dragonflies, bird species? Because those will die off, and the species that rely on them for survival will then die off.
Alphabet should be looking to make harmless the mosquito-borne illnesses, and leave the bugs alone.
"Annoying" is not a valid reason to instigate wide-spread species elimination.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Alphabet is not doing what you think they are doing. Inform yourself.