Google Has a Plan To Eliminate Mosquitoes Around the World (bloombergquint.com) 326
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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Do you want fewer mosquitoes, for at least a little while, or not?
If so, shaddup!
Re:Evolution. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. [gizmodo.com]
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.
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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.
Re:Evolution. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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How long does a species have to be somewhere before there's negative repercussions from removing it?
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The targeted species, Aedes aegypti, is African, and IS NOT NATIVE TO CALIFORNIA. So there should be no negative repercussions from wiping it out.
What about repercussions in AFRICA? "Wiping it out" implies globally, not just in California.
Re:Evolution. (Score:5, Interesting)
"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.
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That's a fair question that needs to be answered, but whatever those costs may be, they must be weighed against the thousands of people who die or are afflicted each year by diseases such as Zika, West Nile, Yellow Fever, and other ailments spread by this species. We aren't talking about wiping this species out because we find them to be a nuisance. We're talking about doing it because tens or hundreds of thousands of people have been debilitated or lost their lives and more will be too if we take no action
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Before the arrival of Europeans, Hawaii had zero mosquitoes.
As well as zero Europeans.
All the mosquitoes there should be wiped out.
D'oh!
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IS NOT NATIVE TO CALIFORNIA. So there should be no negative repercussions from wiping it out.
Humans ARE NOT NATIVE TO YOUR STATE. I suggest we wipe out humans in your state. There should be no negative repercussions.
Careful with that Logic (Score:2)
Before the arrival of Europeans, Hawaii had zero mosquitoes. All the mosquitoes there should be wiped out.
Let's just be a bit careful waving that sort of logic around because the same argument would technically also apply to humans and in a lot more places than just Hawaii.
Cobras? (Score:2)
How about releasing 80,000 cobras into the wild?
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polygoose. c'mon.
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No. Mongeese.
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What is the plural of moose?
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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.
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CRISPR the females to get even better protein from some food source other than blood.
Again, that is totally unrealistic. Any available protein source is going to already be exploited by other species that are far better adapted to it than your gene patched mosquitoes.
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Re:Evolution. (Score:5, Informative)
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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. [gizmodo.com]
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.
The food source part is highly dubious, and the later part is completely unaffected by the method being tested.
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Ya but then the gorillas will just die when winter comes along...
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So replace them with mosquitoes that fills the same ecological niche but doesn't carry malaria?
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Actually, as the name suggests, the Aedes Aegypty is an invasive species to the Americas that arrived in slave boats from Africa (the disease had previously spread from Asia to Africa a few hundred years earlier).
Dengue fever (a disease first identified in Asia) could then spread freely at first in South America but more recently in North America as well.
Eradicating the Aedes Aegypty won't harm biodiversity because it is an invader. And this sort of control measure is very targeted to this particular specie
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I'm sure they would be thrilled to eat some other kind of mosquito that does not spread malaria. Biodiversity needn't include horrific parasites.
Re:You mean like Malaria? (Score:5, Informative)
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Now the mutant mosquitos rise. their old nemesis, the bat is gone. we are overwhelmed with unchecked hungry insects.
oh, of course, not all the bats died. some bats had a predisposition to seeking out other meals. There's now a growing population of bats that make a living off of biting larger land mammals, including people. they also transmit disease.
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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.
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> Usually these world-improvers are bright eyed hacks that get it wrong and make things worse, sometimes massively so.
Citation needed. Similar "bright eyed hacks" wiped out polio and smallpox, and are trying to do the same to malaria.
Re:Evolution. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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a) What's your strict definition of "bright-eyed hacks" vs "oracle genius"? What qualifies Jonas Salks and not Dr. Jacob Crawford?
b) There are very specific species of mosquitoes that are targeted here. Also, nobody knew what eliminating a Polio would do, they just did it. The world adjusted by having more people live.
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You seem to be mistaken about where you are. This is /., not a scientific review committee. The Polio example is still extremely obviously (and extremely obviously back then) something completely different. Makes me think you lack the background to understand what is going on here.
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> The Polio example is still extremely obviously (and extremely obviously back then)
The only reason the polio example was obvious back then was because polio was fucking terrifying and if anything helped everyone was all for it. Most people back then knew someone who was affected by polio. Hell, it lived in the outside environment. You'd hear about little Jimmy was out playing in the park and woke up the next morning and can't walk anymore and all the rest of the kids in the neighborhood are being ke
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No. We have about no examples were a severe infectious disease is critical for an ecosystem. They are nit parasites, where that is different. They are basically biological free-riders. Also, it is very easy to reintroduce that disease in case something begins to really break. Of course, that is not something you tell the public.
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I am an atheist, but thanks.
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Using language customarily used in a certain application domain (here: religion) gives some legitimacy to that domain. But you did already know that, since you are just trolling.
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"Citation needed. Similar "bright eyed hacks" wiped out polio and smallpox, and are trying to do the same to malaria."
That was last millennium. Nowadays people are too stupid to vax their kids, fearing they catch autism.
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> They were not a tech company involving themselves in something that is best left to biologists and ecologists.
So what you think a bunch of Scala coders got bored at Google and started genetically manipulating mosquitos?
What's Bayer? Merck? Bio TECH companies. Bayer and Merck also have a lot of non bio subdivisions but nobody hassles them about those.
Maybe Alphabet, a giant TECH company made a biotech division and staffed it with biologists, geneticists and ecologists? Think that's possible?
But no,
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Hence the proverb, "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions."
Have they checked what else they will kill? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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100% agree. China tried this with sparrows and it caused more problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign
Re:Have they checked what else they will kill? (Score:4, Interesting)
The Australians also messed up badly with Rabbits.
The point is not to not do these things, but to be very, very careful. I doubt Google was ever really careful in anything they do. Too much intelligence and money, not a lot of wisdom.
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They're pretty careful compared to other tech companies. Take self-driving cars for example, which they've worked on for almost a decade already before releasing it.
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The mosquito's targeted are not native to the western hemisphere. These mosquito's even being here are invasive species brought here by people a long time ago.
One of the biggest disease carrying mosquito Aedes aegypti is such an invasive species that was native to africa until humans moved it around the globe. It would be a good thing to wipe this species from it's non-native habitats, not just for people but for the species it displaced. There are thousands of mosquito species but only a handful that trans
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I do agree on that. Were they are not native, wiping them out is likely a manageable risk. But the article is about eliminating them globally, and that is a whole different thing.
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I'm going to sound old-fashioned (Score:5, Insightful)
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"?
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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"?
Nothing relies solely, or even mainly, on mosquitoes. Nor are they trying to kill off every mosquito species.
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While I understand and agree that we need to be very careful with exterminating species, I think the Slashdot crowd may be living in a bit of a first world bubble in this case. This species is the primary vector for malaria, West Nile, Zika, and any number of other life threatening or debilitating illnesses. It's one thing when we're talking about wiping out species so we can build more strips malls, but literally hundreds of thousands of people are dying every year [cdc.gov] due to bites delivered by this species,
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As an aside, while there's a finality to the extinction of a species that needs to be considered solemnly and with care, the extinction of a species is by no means an unusual thing. Species go extinct on an everyday basis, though whether it's one every few days or hundreds every day is a subject of debate [yale.edu]. I don't bring this up to repeat the (fallacious) argument that species extermination is justified because it happens all the time. Rather, I bring it up to highlight our collective hypocrisy: we care abou
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Fact-checking myself: this species doesn't carry malaria. They do carry the other diseases I mentioned, as well as Yellow Fever, Dengue, and others, but malaria was the big one I mentioned, and I got that fact very wrong, so I apologize for that.
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Touche, fair anon. ;^)
DDT ? (Score:2)
Nahh it just works and not much markup at this point seeing as all the patents are expired.
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Too toxic, and too indiscriminate at eradicating bugs. You want to eliminate just a few mosquito species (the ones spreading malaria).
Food Chain Jenga? (Score:2)
Re:Food Chain Jenga? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Biodiversity (Score:2)
Yes. Biodiversity is, apparently, only important if human beings aren't taken into account. Otherwise, it's open season on any species that dares to have a negative impact on humans.
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Re:Food Chain Jenga? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Still disapppointed the previous plan didn't work (Score:2)
I really wanted a mosquito laser cannon.
unlikely to be effective and ill-advised (Score:2)
The best part (Score:4, Interesting)
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Competition? I don't like where this going (Score:2)
"Alexa, eliminate species #29048"
More likely to succeed than ... (Score:2)
This is different from drugs killing large percent of the population, leaving behind immunized populations to propagate. These sterile mosquitoes, fight for and win females and resources and then squander them. So even if a rare mutated immunized mosquito is formed, it is not likely to get far. Its progeny need to find similar immunized males to propagate the immu
Sad (Score:2)
Eliminating mosquitoes an ecological disaster (Score:2)
Breeding and distributing species of mosquitoes that avoid humans, however, would actually be ecologically benign.
I'm sure it won't be done because it costs .01 cents more per hundred thousand mosquitoes killed.
A corporation is going to bioengineer (Score:2)
our environment? What could go wrong?
thought it sounded familiar (Score:2)
and yet.... (Score:2)
they waste time doing it in Cali instead of the real world
unthinking precautionary chorus (Score:2)
So many commenters here who figure that scientists are the last people to get the news about fragile food chains and the dangers of unintended consequence. Probably these commenters are the same group of people who never did their own arithmetic to determine that the precautionary principle can't be applied along all possible dimensions simultaneously.
Add an invasive species where it wasn't formerly found. Big problem: the precautionary principle says to remove the species immediately (some things are still
Is it only me? (Score:2)
With each news release from Alphabet/Google, it seems we'll soon see them convert into Aperture Science Labs.
Coming from Alaska, I can see the allure of this (Score:2)
All this will lead to... (Score:2)
One in a million or whatever will survive and develop an immunity. A few of those will find each other and breed.
All this will lead to.is a new breed of mosquitoes that are immune to wolbachia.
biological weapons (Score:2)
Big Brother Google gets more evil by the day. Now we see these self-righteous wannabe genocidaires planning to release a biological weapon, in hopes of wiping out a whole species.
We call the faction who control Google "social just-us nazis" because they espouse censorship, racism, and militarism. So I guess it's not surprising that they are also enthused about causing animal megadeath. If these crazies are allowed to remain in power, it won't be long until they're building death camps for us deplorables.
P
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Food chain adapting (Score:2)
Only a human ca
Google just became evil (Score:2)
Google has a plan to destroy rainforests (Score:2)
Sounds suspicious (Score:2)
Phase 1: Male Mosquitoes infected with wolbachia breed with females and produce eggs that never hatch
Phase 2: A strain of wolbachia is developed to cross the species barrier and infect humans
Phase 3: Mosquitoes bite humans and transfer altered strain of wolbachia to human hosts who then breed and only give birth to still-born children
Where is Venom Snake when you need him...
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Zika wasn't a problem in South America until the Sharks lost the Stanley Cup in seven games.
Re:The road to hell is paved (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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.
Re:The road to hell is paved (Score:5, Informative)
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Right. Vaccines and antibiotics should be the next to go. Nature, as it comes at us, is the best possible state. Who authorized genocide on the polio virus anyway? #poliovirusrightsnow
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Don't forget arsenic, it's all natural and a great substitute for sugar on your sugar cookies! And all natural botulinin, and all natural radon gas in your basement
#naturallife4eva!
Seriously though, Slashdot really needs to have a hard look at removing AC posting. Just look at all the crap comments on this topic and others, all of them are ACs and more than a few of them seem to be bot directed.
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Unfortunately, I have an abundance of brain cells that I simply choose to ignore, so I will ask: Why?
See, you're going to have to lay out some clear definitions here. Is it really "screwing with nature" to genetically engineer a variant of mosquito to displace disease carriers? What about widespread spraying of pesticides? Destroying swamplands? Building cities? Building a house? What about a crude shelter in the woods? Just a cooking fire?
Humanity's history is defined by our ability to screw with nature. T
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Google breeding billions of blood-sucking mosquitoes and foisting them off on suburbs!
"don't be evil", my ass
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Ignorance at its finest.
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.
Emphasis mine. In case you're not aware, male mosquitos don't bite.
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They will eat all the other stuff that makes up their usual fare, of which skeeters make up only a small percentage.
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Either that, or (most likely) the law of unintended consequences will strike again in yet another huge environmental disaster. I wouldn't put my name on this one if I were Google.
This isn't a new idea. It's been done before and tried in various other countries (or same approach, different specifics)- wiping out mosquitos in an area has not caused any ecological problem in any ecosystem it has been tried in. Now granted, it's only ever been done on a location-specific area and within a year the mosquitos are back. Noone has tried doing a large-spread wiping out of mosquitos over a very large region yet.
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And then what will bats eat?
Bats eat a lot more than just mosquitos. Nothing eats ONLY mosquitos. Not one species relies solely on mosquitos... and besides only a minority of mosquito species bite people. To prevent spread of human disease you only wipe out the mosquitos that bite people.
The "friendly" mosquitos will then move in instead.
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Re: Finally something from Google/Alphabet (Score:2)
That question is answered in the article.
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I think it's legal provided they annotate the result:
This item isn't available in your country
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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.