Submitted by lughnasadh t3_yortnc in Futurology
Reply to comment by lughnasadh in English company Oxitec has released a simple, easy to distribute commercial product they say cuts Dengue Fever spreading mosquito populations by 96%. By just adding water, genetically modified mosquito eggs mature into males whose sperm cannot result in viable female larvae. by lughnasadh
Does the technique not work on the species that transmits malaria, or has it just not been done yet because they started with the dengue transmitting ones?
The second, but they've started trails for the malaria mosquitoes too. https://www.oxitec.com/en/news/oxitecs-malaria-program-receives-new-investment-to-expand-to-pilot-phases-in-two-malaria-affected-regions
If there's thing everybody can universally get behind it's mosquito genocide
If we could eradicate the disease reservoir for mosquito-borne diseases that would be ideal - I think people could live with mozzies if they knew they weren’t going to get malaria/schistosomiasis/dengue/Zika/West Nile/Japanese encephalitis etc. Then again there are so many animal diseases that they spread and maintain the existence of as well…
Nah FUCK those bitches, unless they're zapping me with improve mental health juice instead of itchy juice I want them all dead.
There was an article saying how they used mosquitoes to transmit a malaria vaccine recently.
Maybe they could do mosquito abatement and release these from non treated water so there wouldn’t be a really heavy mosquito season. That and there would be fewer bad mosquitoes to mate with making the process more effective.
The only good mosquito is a dead mosquito. I don't care it would damage the biosphere or whatever - they hurt. And they love me.
Kill. Them. All.
Similarly, I don't care about you. You can't just purposefully destroy a species, that's horrific.
When it comes to mosquitos, If I can, I would lol.
I'd also strongly recommend you ask whether you should, before worrying about being itchy. Taking something out of the food chain can have unintended consequences. They're tiny but you'd be amazed how much of their biomass supports birds and fish. The world is already unbalanced enough without taking things out of the house of cards willy nilly.
I think i've read it may be possible to just remove the highest offending species, but it still needs to be closely monitored.
Oh, it absolutely would have consequences, yes. I don't care.
We already drove numerous species to extinction (no, seriously, we are an extinction event called the Holocene extinction, we killed 30% of all species in 500 years), at least this time it would be for an excellent reason.
Well thankfully more sensible types will be making that decision 🙏
Especially when we don't know the consequences of eradicating the species.
We would lose our galactic status as a protected wild life reserve.
Humans are the disease reservoir for some of these.
That would be an ecological disaster. Think of all the other animals that feed on said mosquitoes.
There's already been studies to show there's enough non mosquito insects to feed from. In short, the world has tons of bugs. Also there's no animal that feeds solely on mosquitoes
Tons of bugs for now
Not that many animals feed on one thing so I don't think that is a very good argument. What I'd like to see is percentage of diet for each animal and then overall for each area, to see the impact. As well as the "accidental pollination" as it's called, that the males do since they feed on nectar and such, less pollination is always a negative.
I am not against the idea but I think there's a lot more to the eradicatin of a species than most of these studies seem to show...
And don't forget animals whose population is reduced by such pests, no matter how ugly it sounds - too much wild goats/deers/bulls etc is a natural disaster too.
Maybe every dumbass who doesn't understand how ecosystems work. Mosquitoes are very important. we should be focusing on protection and vaccines
I don't think so, actually.
The species that bother humans are very limited. Out of the 3000+ species of mosquito of which we are aware, less than 100 bother humans at all. And less than 10 cause the diseases that kill hundreds of thousands of humans every year.
Do you think ecologists are not involved in this research? The majority opinion of scientists is that is that it's acceptable. The eradication of say, the Aedes mosquito would eliminate Dengue Fever. Eradication of Anopheles would eliminate Malaria. The loss of these two species would not severely impact the ecosystem considering the fact that their ecological niche would be taken up by other mosquitos that do not bother humans, mosquitos that are already in the same ecosystem.
Malaria is caused by a parasite, there is no such thing as a vaccine. The anti-parasitical medication which kills the parasite has to be taken weekly. You cannot idealistically expect millions (almost a billion, actually) of poor people to buy this medication. Strategically eliminating specific mosquito species would save the lives of millions of people. Literally millions. These are real people, real lives, not some fucking statistic which you can blindly sacrifice in order to preserve a couple handfuls of mosquito species.
I'm not taking lives lightly. I think some here are taking the fragility and interconnectedness of ecosystems lightly. We can guess, but we can't know the ramifications of taking actions like this.
The certain deaths of millions of people take precedent over the possibility of unforeseen ecological impacts, especially if experts say those impacts are unlikely.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2019.0270
As a matter of fact, the spread of the Aedes mosquito (responsible for most mosquito diseases but not malaria), originally localized to Egypt, is a result of human intervention. This species is inherently invasive, that is, it does not belong in most ecosystems.
The extinction of human-feeding mosquitos also heads off the possibility of a future global pandemic of zoonotic origin that jumps species to humanity due to mosquitos. And the pandemic is significantly more likely than severe ecological impact from their extinction. As a matter of fact, scientists have been warning about the dangers of a COVID-like pathogen being transmissible by mosquitos.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-06-25/column-california-mosquitoes
We cause the extinction of dozens of animal species (about 150) literally every day. This one just happens to be deliberate, because they're causing half- to three-quarters of a million human deaths every year. And because of climate change, one of those deaths might end up being you.
>We cause the extinction of dozens of animal species (about 150) literally every day
Precisely. Humanity is a disaster. I understand and appreciate your argument, and you may be right. But for me it is never okay to genocide a species. As far as I'm concerned it's nature trying to reclaim a bit of space for itself.
If it makes you feel better, the mosquito species in question will continue to exist in much lower numbers farther from human civilization. This kind of measure is self-limiting because the modified mosquitos (and their offspring) will eventually die out on their own, being sterile. Aedes populations in remote regions will survive. The hope is that with those lower numbers the diseases will die out since the mosquitos will be exposed to far fewer infected humans.
Yeah I get it. For me, the biosphere is always ranked above humanity in importance (since it is what we are and what we depend on). Ultimately I am more concerned about the precedent this would set. Earth is extremely overpopulated and we are bound to live in places that the earth would rather reclaim. Not trying to minimize the importance of human life, just saying human life isn't more important than earth life.
Mosquitoes are not native to America. They don't belong here and our ecosystem would be better for it.
Many scientists have already said that if every human biting mosquito suddenly went extinct that it would have almost no effect on the ecosystem. Other than of course less deaths from mosquitos.
Oh good, it didn't seem correct to me that they'd hit such a roadblock for such a similar type of pest.
The mosquitoes that transmit malaria are less easy to manipulate genetically, and their eggs can't be dried in the same way as they're way less hardy than dengue mosquito's eggs. So Oxitec started with the easier job, forugoid reason. Also there's way more commercial viability for anti-dengue interventions for all sorts of reason's.
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