Florida District Considers Releasing GMO Mosquitos After Cayman Islands Experiment (accuweather.com) 144
It's already underway just 364 miles south of Florida, according to the Associated Press. "The first wave of genetically modified mosquitoes were released Wednesday in the Cayman Islands as part of a new effort to control the insect that spreads Zika and other viruses," according to an article shared by Slashdot reader Okian Warrior:
Genetically altered male mosquitoes, which don't bite but are expected to mate with females to produce offspring that die before reaching adulthood, were released in the West Bay area of Grand Cayman Island, according to a joint statement from the Cayman Islands Mosquito Research and Control Unit and British biotech firm Oxitec.
"What could possibly go wrong?" asks The Atlantic, citing history's great pest-control fails in Hawaii and Australia. But a similar release is already being considered in the Florida Keys, though Accuweather reports it apparently depends on the results of a November referendum which could also "affect the likelihood of Oxitec trials taking place in other parts of the United States."
"What could possibly go wrong?" asks The Atlantic, citing history's great pest-control fails in Hawaii and Australia. But a similar release is already being considered in the Florida Keys, though Accuweather reports it apparently depends on the results of a November referendum which could also "affect the likelihood of Oxitec trials taking place in other parts of the United States."
The only goog mosquitos (Score:2)
were made of wood
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Google's bloodsucking lawyers?
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Don't know what will happen to animals that eat mosquitoes. I guess we'll collapse that food chain when we come to it...
They are not trying to wipe out all mosquitoes, just the varieties that spread disease. There are plenty of species of mosquitoes that are not vectors for any human diseases, and they can fill the same niche.
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The mosquito release will have the beneficial side effect of driving away liberals who may have been infesting the area.
The role of mosquitoes in the ecosystem has already been studied, and there are plenty of other species, like damsel flies, that would take their place as fish and bat food. Besides, we would need to eliminate only a small number of species that bite humans:
http://www.nature.com/news/201... [nature.com]
Replacing the lost liberals could be more of a problem. Scientists are not sure whether Republicans c
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IIRC, there was an article when they first started talking about deliberately causing an extinction of mosquitoes. Research found they weren't really necessary in any foodchain, and that the resources they compete for (other than blood) being freed up for similarly sized insects should cause no interruption in the foodchain. But that's why they're doing one of these reversable releases.
Personally, I don't see why we let mosquitoes live. They're a horrible disease vector, and beyond that annoying as hel
Short-Lived Trial (Score:2, Interesting)
Unless the released mosquitoes are replenished, their offspring will not perpetuate the cycle and so this trial won't last long. I'm not sure how plausible this would be, but it would be much better to release modified mosquitoes who's offspring are all male. This would then eradicate this species of mosquito.
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GMOs are never made to solve a problem once and for all. They're made to be rented indefinitely. It's all about the cash flow, baby.
Re: Short-Lived Trial (Score:1)
This. I do like technology, and I approve with the concept of genetically modifying organisms to solve various problems, but these things need to be done on a non commercial only basis, otherwise we ll soon have birds falling down from the skies because the 40 day trial of the modification expired and the government didnt have the money to pay Monsanto in time.
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This. I do like technology, and I approve with the concept of genetically modifying organisms to solve various problems, but these things need to be done on a non commercial only basis, otherwise we ll soon have birds falling down from the skies because the 40 day trial of the modification expired and the government didnt have the money to pay Monsanto in time.
Although I would generally agree with you, our track record for introducing new species to fix a problem is dismally low. There are a few cases where we've been successful (salmon in the great lakes) but many more where the "solution" caused even more problems (any of the hundreds of invasive species introduced to fix a problem). I kindof like the idea of controlled experiments with built-in kill switches.
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Re:Short-Lived Trial (Score:5, Informative)
It is short-lived. The point is to breed lots of mosquitos, and release in an area. You continue doing this for several cycles, and significantly depress numbers of mosquitos in the area.
The mosquitos in principle are very cheap and easy to raise - you need to grow them in a very low-tech lab, with tetracycline in their food, and then sort by size before releasing them. (the large ones are females which you destroy).
You can actually exterminate species this way.
This has been done before. From http://www.fao.org/docrep/U422... [fao.org]
"USDA scientists next arranged a screwworm eradication experiment against a completely isolated population on the island of Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles. The island covers an area of 440 km and is 65 km from the coast of Venezuela. Screwworms were mass-reared in a facility near Orlando, Florida. Irradiated pupae were shipped by air to Curaçao, and the emerged flies were released by a single-engine plane flying 1.6 km wide swaths over the island. Each week 300 sterile flies were released per square kilometre during the eradication phase. Within less than six months from the initiation of the experiment, screwworms were eradicated from the island of Curaçao, in 1954 (Baumhover et al., 1955). "
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It is short-lived.
Only if they encounter an environment without a trace of tetracycline, which is almost impossible thanks to the gigantic use of this stuff in animal raising, releasing lots of it into the environment as by-product. The assumption that the mosquitos will be 'sterile' is hereby turned into a dream.
Funny by the way that until this mosquito became available from Gates & The Rockefellers, some countries had zika-infection rates of 75% of the population without a significant amount of babies born with micro-
Re:Short-Lived Trial (Score:5, Informative)
Err - no. Tetracycline levels need to be really high. From memory, it's about .1% of the food.
There is nowhere in nature that this exists - apart perhaps from some third world pharmaceutical plant. Mere traces don't do it.
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and significantly depress numbers of mosquitos in the area.
While significantly increasing the size of the mosquito supplier's bank account. But guess how many mosquito generations it takes for the numbers to be back to the old levels the moment you stop paying... not that many at all.
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As an alternative to engineering the mosquito - it may be possible to engineer the endosymbiant.
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Are you sure? [buzzfeed.com]
I'll tell you what could go wrong... (Score:1, Insightful)
More anti-science hipsters screaming about genetically modified stuff. We lived through the Bush Jr. administration and there was a ton of clearly anti-science bullshit thrown around (e.g. stem cell research, barring the term climate change in NASA, etc). But this is no different coming from the liberal part of the political spectrum.
The general population should just shut their fucking mouths when they feel like spewing an "opinion" about something. Science is a process and is hard. It's about time we
Re:I'll tell you what could go wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
The general population should just shut their fucking mouths when they feel like spewing an "opinion" about something.
Then why don't you starting by setting a good example?
Science is a process and is hard.
That's why it's perfectly fine for people to voice concerns when they start experimenting in the wild. It's not like we have a perfect overview of how significantly reducing these mosquito populations will affect all other animals that feed on them (and the animals that feed on those, plants that depend on their excrement etc), just to name one potential unintended side effect. Or how it may allow other animals to largely expand their population due to reduced competition for habitats or food sources (mosquitos generally don't survive on blood, that's just what they need for procreation). Or conversely, certain nutrients no longer getting sufficiently removed from the water by mosquito larvae, resulting on too high concentrations of certain substances that then start killing other animals or plants.
TL;DR: Voice educated questions about scientific stuff. Do not broadcast uninformed opinions derived from your safe spot.
If anything is anti-science, it's trying to pre-emptively paint any debate by the general public as uninformed hipster trash. Because that is how you create luddites: by telling people they don't have a say, can't possibly understand anything about the ramifications, and should shut up and defer to some abstract scientists in ivory towers on the authority of some anonymous coward throwing a tantrum.
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It's not like we have a perfect overview of how significantly reducing these mosquito populations will affect all other animals that feed on them (and the animals that feed on those, plants that depend on their excrement etc), just to name one potential unintended side effect. Or how it may allow other animals to largely expand their population due to reduced competition for habitats or food sources (mosquitos generally don't survive on blood, that's just what they need for procreation). Or conversely, certain nutrients no longer getting sufficiently removed from the water by mosquito larvae, resulting on too high concentrations of certain substances that then start killing other animals or plants.
We're talking about extinguishing one species of mosquito. There are thousands of species out there. They will simply expand their numbers and fill the ecological niche left empty by the death of Aedes Aegypti.
But for the sake of the argument, let's assume that your doomsday scenario does happen. Would you rather risk having children with microcephalia and no ecological imbalance? Or do you actually live somewhere that mosquitos do not proliferate, so you are actually just risking other people's children, n
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If removing this mosquito species somehow has an unexpected dire impact on the ecosystem, it will be extremely easy to re-introduce them to the area. In fact all you have to do is stop buying the genetically modified species and wait a few years.
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See how this doesn't work?
Re: I'll tell you what could go wrong... (Score:4, Funny)
but some facts are just facts, and some batshit crazy ideas are just plain flat batshit crazy ideas.
"Things fall on Earth because gravity."
"I don't like this gravity of yours. You are a shill for Big Physics?"
See how this doesn't work?
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Opinions however...
Re: I'll tell you what could go wrong... (Score:2)
I'm not sure what your point is here, and i don't mean it rhetorically.
look, we probably agree there's a number of things out there that are simply _not_ a matter of opinion (like "how many stars are there in our solar system?")
if I were to challenge the accepted, patently correct answer ("one"), i'd better come armed with extraordinary data, sound arguments, and the expertise to put them together meaningfully.
the shorthand for this we call "scientific evidence".
if i lack any evidence , and I claim to see a
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False equivalence much? [wikipedia.org]
Asking for Long-Term Studies, aka Show me the data is not anti-science. Where is the data for the 5, 10, 20, and 40+ year environmental impact?
For every "problem" technology promises to fix it almost always raises 2 more problems.
All you've done is trade one dogma for another. Healthy Skepticism helps keep blind faith (in Science) in check.
What could go wrong? (Score:5, Informative)
Limited.
These mosquitos can't bite people - they're males.
They can't reproduce due to their sterility.
The DNA can't transfer to other things because that bit of engineered DNA is very special purpose, and does not confer any significant fitness to anything.
This works by having mosquitos mate (which they do only with their own species), and having the developing eggs have developmental defects that lead to them dying in the egg. The female mosquito is otherwise unaffected, but dies after she lays the eggs, as she would normally.
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Not so limited.
One possible scenario would be that the engineered male mates with a female that has a certain DNA variation that allows their offspring to live. Because the rest of the population is now failing to have viable offspring, the new generations coming from the female with the DNA variation are now in advantage. We cannot predict what impact this new variation would have in the environment. Add up the fact that a single mosquito generation lasts only around two weeks, just one year of deploying e
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Sure. And now explain why the same risk isn't present when any other significant challenge (a dry year) happens.
Plus - the 'new variation' - there is no plausible direct genetic benefit from this gene. It doesn't make the mosquitos more fit under any circumstance.
Also - any remnant resistant population can be followed up by either genetic variants, or irradiated mosquitos.
Reducing the level of mosquito to 0.1% of current is a success of its own, even if it does not lead to eradication.
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Reducing the level of mosquito to 0.1% of current is a success of its own, even if it does not lead to eradication.
And now explain why this mosquito will not be succeeded by an insect with worse properties that didn't get a chance due to the presence of the mosquito.
Re:What could go wrong? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, Aedes aegypti is an invase species, so its extinction would probably just lead to the recovery of the native mosquito populations. But which "insect with worse properties" do you have in mind? Aedes aegypti is as bad as it gets.
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If you remove aedes aegypti, velociraptors might make a comeback to fill the human-eating niche.
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Because mosquito populations move naturally around the environment at the moment, and are not particularly limited by the presence of other species.
This mosquito being targeted does not compete meaningfully for any resources with other mosquitos that carry diseases that affect humans.
Those other mosquitos or other biting insects are limited by resources, and breeding pools and such - not competition with the one that is being proposed to be eliminated or reduced.
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Not so limited.
One possible scenario would be that the engineered male mates with a female that has a certain DNA variation that allows their offspring to live. Because the rest of the population is now failing to have viable offspring, the new generations coming from the female with the DNA variation are now in advantage. We cannot predict what impact this new variation would have in the environment. Add up the fact that a single mosquito generation lasts only around two weeks, just one year of deploying engineered mosquitoes would lead to a considerable time in terms of evolutionary changes.
Yes, this would be the most likely scenario. If we eliminated 99% of this particular species of mosquito, chances are that remaining 1% or a completely different species of mosquito would expand to fill this particular niche. If we are lucky, this new species would be less harmful that the one we just killed off. If we are unlucky, the trait that makes the 1% resistant to eradication also gives this new mosquito some even more obnoxious trait like the ability to asexually reproduce, swarm, and kill its h
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If we are unlucky, the trait that makes the 1% resistant to eradication also gives this new mosquito some even more obnoxious trait like the ability to asexually reproduce, swarm, and kill its host.
Care to explain how this could possibly happen? The GMO mosquitos express a protein whose effect is to stop other genes from expressing. How could this lead to the ability of asexually reproducing?
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Are you stupid or did you just chose to ignore the entire conversation thread?
One possible scenario would be that the engineered male mates with a female that has a certain DNA variation that allows their offspring to live. Because the rest of the population is now failing to have viable offspring, the new generations coming from the female with the DNA variation are now in advantage.
Does this answer your question?
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Are you stupid or did you just choose to ignore my entire post? It was not that long.
I asked how the trait that makes the 1% resistant to eradication could possibly lead to asexual reproduction. You answered how could resistance to eradication evolve in the first place.
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Are you stupid or did you just choose to ignore my entire post? It was not that long.
I asked how the trait that makes the 1% resistant to eradication could possibly lead to asexual reproduction. You answered how could resistance to eradication evolve in the first place.
It's not that that specific added gene would cause the asexual reproduction, it's that you've just made it impossible for the "normal" mosquito population to reproduce. This leaves only the 1% who are resistant to this method. Very few eradication methods are 100% effective. The 1% that are left would survive by having some mutant genes that makes them resistant to this particular eradication method. What those mutant genes are would be anyone's guess. As Jurassic Park famously said: "Nature Finds A W
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Asexual reproduction would be one way to avoid being killed. There might be other recessive traits that also might surface.
It is obvious that asexual reproduction would be a way to avoid being killed. What I asked is how that could possibly evolve in Aedes aegypti. Are you suggesting that there already exist some female mosquitos that reproduce parthenogenetically, and that they will take over the species once the sexually reproducing ones die off? This is just impossible. Asexual reproduction is a complex adaptation, it doesn't just happen.
I think there is a widespread misconception that DNA is some kind of magic box that can
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What? Somebody being polite and admitting to a mistake? On my Slashdot?
I apologize for insulting you back.
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There are some 3000 species of mosquitoes. Only a handful bite humans or carry diseases. Eliminating one invasive species of the many present is not going to change the balance of nature enough to notice.
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Then some offspring will inherit some modified genes but not the sterility and here we go: the foreign genes are introduced into the species.
That's why this experiment is totally wrong.
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What's wrong about that? Even if that happens we will have transformed Aedes Aegypti into a species that can only reproduce near chicken factories. That is a much better situation than what we have know, as it currently reproduces very well in densely populated urban centres.
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These mosquitoes can't bite people - they're males.
I think that we need to leave mosquitoes some time to think about their gender. Do they want to bite folks in the women's toilets? Or in the men's toilets?
They can't reproduce due to their sterility.
Who knows . . . ? When we start mucking around with their DNA, who knows what will happen . . . ?
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This works by having mosquitos mate (which they do only with their own species), and having the developing eggs have developmental defects that lead to them dying in the egg.
And the ones that don't die are born with little bitty heads. Guess what they pass on to humans?
Zika (discovered in 1947) didn't cause the microcephaly in Brazil or anywhere else. The GMO mosquitoes previously released (to combat dengue) and/or the pyriproxyfen added to the water did. Zika is conveniently taking the fall for an experiment gone horribly wrong.
GMOs are cool and stuff, but the people/companies doing the work are extremely greedy and careless. This is why we can't have nice things, like nuclear power, which also can be made perfectly safe.
I am impressed. You had sense enough to not provide a link to naturalnews.com as a reference.
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You can do your own googling... Or what, you need to have your food pre-chewed before being spoon fed to you also? Sorry, I'm not doing your homework for you. This whole Zika thing is bogus, nothing but a big fat cover-up. And the people who believe it are the same mental midgets that are voting for Trump. Oh well, looking at the bright side, you might be able to kill off 6 billion people before anybody says boo.
How it works. (Score:5, Informative)
The males are engineered to pass on a gene to their offspring. This gene kills the offspring.
So as to be able to raise them in the lab, the gene can be turned off by adding tetracycline to the food - an antibiotic.
If for some reason this fails in a small percentage of mosquitos - nothing happens other than normal mosquitos being produced.
But, in the vast majority of cases, the eggs are produced and during development, because there is no tetracycline (an antibiotic) in the environment, they die.
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Got to love the anti technology stories on Slashdot.
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I heard something about tetracycline and other chemicals being fairly prevalent in our waterways, especially where waste water enters rivers and streams.
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This is something that a field trial can easily tell us. But I would bet that whathever tetracycline there is in our waterways it is not nearly enough to allow the mosquitos to survive.
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Tetracycline has a fairly short lifespan before it breaks down. Also less likely to be encountered in the wild than, say, penicillin produced by natural molds.
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The antibiotic is just used as it is a convenient chemical that is well understood how to use for switching things on and off.
It would be fed to your breeding stock of mosquitos, not as I understand it the maturing to-be-released mosquitos.
There will not be significant levels of antibiotic in the released mosquitos.
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Apart from that, amongst the millions (if not billions) mosquitoes released, who is to say that ALL of the descendants will be mutation-free and so actually dead before hatching? What genes are really included in the package beyond the sterility one, and so will be released into the natural mosquito population if a descendant survive? Gene-
Why not use irradiated sterile mosquito (Score:2)
Instead of this, why not just use the irradiated sterile mosquitos instead? Its been done before. When that is available and just as effective, why mess with something that is more complex.
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It's probably significantly easier to produce them. All the have to do with these genetically modified mosquitoes is provide tetracycline to them, and their eggs will hatch as normal. Once the tetracycline is taken away, the eggs they produce will not be able to grow. This leads to another interesting possibility, which I would think would be much, much more effective (and probably controversial). That is to distribute tetracycline over a large area, like by dusting it, while simultaneously introducing the
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It may be with consideration of further DNA modifications.
http://www.nature.com/nbt/jour... [nature.com] - as an example.
This is an interesting technique which means that if you mate a wild mosquito, and a modified one, you get a modified male, or an infertile female.
This can spread through the population and wipe it out.
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Why not just nuke them from orbit? It's the only way to be sure.
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Because RADIATION!!! How can you even consider doing releasing RADIOACTIVE MOSQUITOES on the world??
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Instead of this, why not just use the irradiated sterile mosquitos instead?
Irradiated mosquitoes tend to be too wrecked to get laid very often, when there are healthy males around.
Re:Why not use irradiated sterile mosquito (Score:4, Interesting)
Because they are not sexy enough. Seriously. The female mosquitos do not want to mate with them, so they don't make much impact.
But what I'm curious about is why don't they use the GMO mosquitos that only have male descendents. That would quickly bring the species to extinction.
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But what I'm curious about is why don't they use the GMO mosquitos that only have male descendents. That would quickly bring the species to extinction.
That a much harder genetic engineering problem. It also involves having the GMO organism reproducing in the wild, which will make regulations and environmental assessments much more difficult.
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I can see that people would be touchy about GMO organisms reproducing in the wild; just look at the comments here, people are already up in arms against a sterile GMO.
But why is it a harder genetic engineering problem? The technique used here was including a gene that would express a protein that stops the expression of other genes, stopping the descendants from developing. Why can't we simply include this gene in the X chromosome, so that only female descendants don't develop? Or include a gene that stops
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Instead of this, why not just use the irradiated sterile mosquitos instead? Its been done before
Not sure about this specific species, but from what I'd heard radiation levels required to sterilize often make the insects quite sick and less able to compete for mates. So it's not as effective.
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Non-sterile males with unviable offspring are more effective because they waste the time of the mother mosquito and prevent her from finding a viable mate while she raises the eggs.
Ian Malcolm (Score:1)
The Lysine Contingency (Score:2)
I think you ment to say "Life will find a way"; nevertheless this rings similar to the story in the book and film where the animals were engineered to be dependent on lysine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
In the original novel animals had already escaped from the island before the events of the first movie. The attack on the little girl in "The Lost World" movie adaptation didn't take place on "Site B" in the book but in the surrounding area, before the incident. In the closing chapters of the first nove
Build in a kill switch (Score:2)
What if you created a genetically modified mosquito that died when it came into contact with the blood of members of the homo genus? Basically build in a kill switch that would kill it if it came into contact with a human. This could prevent the transmission of communicable diseases from person to person. Furthermore, if you made this a dominant inheritable trait you could also introduce a natural selection pressure that could cause the mosquitos to evolve away from targeting humans.
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You haven't met my cousin cleetus. Kill switch or not, they'll die if they even fly too close to him.
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While I like the idea of mosquitoes who drink blood and die... (and remember biting mosquitoes also transmit heartworm and other animal diseases, and are the leading cause of death in caribou, so why stop with making only human blood lethal? make it hemoglobin, that might do it),,,
A killing dominant would select more and more for the homozygous recessive normals, until pretty soon you had a totally immune population. This is why other critters have relatively few widespread lethal dominants -- they're too s
Genetically modified organisms are foolproof! (Score:2)
But that doesn't mean we won't get more than we bargained for [brettjames.com].
Only affects one species (Score:1)
An important consideration is that this plan would only (hopefully) affect one SPECIES of mosquito. Different mosquitoes don't interbreed (much).
In an ideal world, this strategy would be used to control the species of mosquitoes that carry certain human diseases, while the others are unaffected, or even encouraged since they now have less competition.
If by some accident, we wipe out all mosquitoes everywhere, we just have to release new ones from captivity. Yes, it would be an ecological disaster, but ver
Re: Only affects one species (Score:2)
"We humans do not have the knowledge needed to modify an ecosystem while accounting for all of the potential outcomes."
that might be true, but we've doing exactly that since we started smashing rocks one against another.
the only effective answer to your concerns is more research and more science.
going back to caves could also work, but few among us want to die at 35.
Unexpected Side Effects (Score:4, Interesting)
My city drops larvicide down all the storm sewers three times a year in order to prevent West Nile Virus. (We've had no cases here and no positive tests in mosquitoes either this year.) So the bugs are gone and the job is done. But the flies are the worst they have been in at least 12 yeast (I can't say any further because I've only lived in this house for 12 years). The problem is that there are no predators in my suburb to eat flying insects anymore. Before the city started dropping the larvicide down the storm sewers there were plenty of swifts, purple martins, bats, and other flying animals that would eat insects. There was only parcel of land where some swifts managed to live until a last year when houses started being built on it. Now none of those animals exist in the suburb. The city could have encouraged more of those birds and bats to thrive here by giving away homes for them. It would have been cheaper in the long run instead of having to apply chemicals three times a year, every year.
Now we are seeing parts of the city where insect populations are getting out of control because there are no predators around. The city has to respond with chemicals because that's the only response left to them. The ecosystem is much more complex than what you think, even if you think it's complex. This plan isn't just taking out a particular insect. It has a purpose in the web or else it would exist.
GMO is an acronym for... (Score:2)
Genetically Modified Organism. If you say Genetically Modified Organism mosquitoes, it makes no sense, and makes you sound like an idiot who doesn't understand science or the English language. Stop misusing the term.
What can go wrong? (Score:3)
Other than that, really nothing can go wrong.
They are genetically modified to be unable to successfully reproduce.
(And if somebody says "Life will find a way", since that would require it actually surviving to a new generation, I will hunt you down and beat you to extinction with a T-Rex bone to prove the point!) (Yeah, ok, I don't actually hurt anyone, but I hope you found the comment humorous / humerus since extinction proves the quote isn't true in the first place.)
Re:What can go wrong? (Score:4, Informative)
Aedes Egypti, the targeted mosquito, is not native to Florida and most places where it is found. This treatment targets this one species of mosquito. Florida and other places have their own native mosquito species. These species are not nearly as dangerous as Egypti. When we eradicate Aedes Egypti, the native mosquitos will take over the niches left and things would if anything be returned to their more natural state in these areas.
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or it will collapse the mosquito population and have a cascade effect on all the animals that rely on them, and those that rely on the previous ones, and so on. Other than that, really nothing can go wrong.
"Aedes aegypti species, which are *not native* to the Cayman Islands and are the main vector for Zika as well as other viruses, including chikingunya and dengue."
a similar method works well ... (Score:2)
Since the last century we have been releasing engineered sterile fruit flies to protect commercial crops. In the US, the Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has found it to be an efficient method of control. In Peru, Australia, Croatia, South Africa and other places around the world sterile flies control populations without the dangers of chemical methods.
This genetic manipulation method for mosquitoes is certainly worth a try. I've heard that some locations are attempting to import bats to
Sigh. (Score:2)
We've been *over* this, people!
If the released mosquitos get out of control, we just drop mosquito-eating lizards.
If the lizards become a problem, we simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
What about the snakes? We're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
And the beautiful part: When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
I know the Keys Mosquito Control District well. (Score:3)
They were one of my clients for many years, until I sold my company about ten years ago. They are almost certainly the most sophisticated and technically capable mosquito control operation in the world, and I've worked with hundreds of them.
Many visitors to the Keys are unaware of the potential for a hellish mosquito problem there. This is not a natural situation. There are few places that have such a concentration of prime mosquito habitat next to dense human populations. If the Florida Keys Mosquito District simply stopped doing mosquito stopped doing mosquito control, I am confident that within a year the problem would be so bad that keys would be largely depopulated. Tourists, even many residents remain blissfully unaware of this because FKMCD is also one of the most effective district anywhere.
One of the reasons the FKMCD is so effective is it has been willing to try things that nobody else has ever done. For example they did a study of how well common pesticides actually work on the mosquitoes in their district. You'd think every district would do this routinely; after all it's pointless to spend money on pesticides your mosquitoes are resistant to, but nobody does it but FKMCD. The way most agencies choose pesticides is they go with the cheapest one. And if that doesn't work, they use more of it. FKMCD *knows* what works in their district, and how much they need to use. When you spend a million and a half bucks a year on pesticides, this is a big deal: in saving money, in reducing environmental impacts, and in keeping people from getting bit.
FKMCD has put a huge amount of investment into rapid response. Usually when a district goes out to spray an area it's in response to information that they received days, or even weeks earlier. This is not cost effective because usually the problem will have run its course by then; the mosquitoes just aren't there, they're somewhere else. In the Keys if you see a spray truck you can be sure it is being directed from data that is about twelve hours old. Since fogging has to be done in the wee hours of the morning, this is the theoretical limit for how quickly you can respond to information you receive during the day. Faster and more targeted response was the major focus of my work with them, and they paid me a lot of money to achieve success at that. It was money well spent, if I do say so myself.
This cost-is-no-object approach enabled FKMCD to achieve things that other districts can only dream of. On the other hand, it has its downsides. You could argue that the agency doesn't have to be quite as vigilant as it is, and that its success was fostering a cavalier attitude about ratepayer money. A few years ago the second-in-command was caught giving a company phone to his wife and daughter, something which did immense reputational harm to the district.
Also across Florida in the 2010s there was a movement by Tea Party to gain control of local government boards. The "Mosquitoeers" campaigned against sitting mosquito control board members by linking them with Obama, and this proved successful, even in the Keys. The results, according to the people I stay in contact with, is that spray missions have had to be curtailed because of vehicles with worn tires, or even running low on pesticides -- something that was unheard of ten years ago. They've also had management turnover -- their long-term and very experienced director retired and the replacement left after a few short years.
Still, if there's any district that can do this pilot project and track the effectiveness of the results, it's FKMCD. It is the ideal place to try it. And you just can't go off half-cocked in the Keys either, because Federal regulators watch the place like a hawk. Hopefully this represents a turn to a more balanced approach -- still aggressive and innovative, but a little more cost conscious.
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They did such a good job another species took over their niche (annoying humans).
Horseflies, I found out the hard way when we towed a boat down the keys portion of the Intercoastal channel.
Every slow no wake zone was a feeding ground where they attack the occupants on mass.
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Tho it's not like the horseflies, blackflies, deerflies, and gnats aren't there regardless. We have horseflies and deerflies up in the mountains far above mosquito habitat, and they will eat you alive.
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It isn't necessarily wrong. Camels may still be smoked by more doctors than any other brand, though I haven't checked the latest survey. The commercial makes no claims at all that the doctors are certifying it as healthy, and doctors remain human and free to pursue unhealthy habits.
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Judging by the heinous misuse of the acronym, my guess is uninformed knee jerk reaction is correct.
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Nice. So you live somewhere without mosquitoes, and are telling from your golden throne that the people suffering from Zika, dengue, and yellow fever should do nothing and accept their suffering in order to not subject your royal highness to any imaginable risk?
Luckily the government of Brazil doesn't give a shit about what you think and it is spreading GMO mosquitoes all over the country.
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Please, spread them faster and everywhere. Mosquitoes and what they carry are one thing the world can do very well without.
Even if eliminating a few species of mosquito had drawbacks (unlikely since they are one of many in their niche) -- consider all the pesticides that would no longer be necessary, and the net gain to the environment.
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Mosquito-born disease affects lots of people around the globe, but how do we know the little flying Frankenstein monsters aren't going to end up enabling future mutations that helps disease (existing, or new ones) to spread to even MORE people?
Because they are sterile, unable to spread genes and male, unable to bite and spread disease. And if it loses the sterility somehow, that's the wild mosquito now isn't it? This tech lest you target one specific species while leaving all the other bugs, birds, even other mosquito species unpoisoned. You can even only release enough sterile males to keep populations lowered instead of extinct. Wild mosquitoes can also mutate in all the dangerous ways you mentioned, at least as easily. If you let viruses
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Also, there is literally no way that the spread of Zika will stop, so efforts like these are silly.
Care to explain why? If we reduce the population of mosquitoes enough Zika will not spread. It is as simple as that.
And come on, there exist no animal whose diet consists exclusively of Aedes Aegypti. If we eliminate it, they will just eat other mosquitoes instead. It is not as if there is any lack of mosquitoes in the wild.
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The species of mosquito that carries the virus is non native in Florida and most places it is found. The treatment targets one species. These places have their own native mosquitos that are more harmless, these mosquitos would fill any environmental niche.
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The spread of smallpox is inevitable, so trying to stop it is silly. Eliminating smallpox will just cause some other virus to fill its ecological niche, so you'll almost certainly cause more harm than good.