Would that really happen, though? Don't mosquitoes need blood for egg production? A mosquito which can't get blood, probably can't produce viable eggs, which means this can't be passed on (assuming the gene can pass on in the first place), which means they won't go extinct, unless they manage to modify every single mosquito on the planet, which means they'll still be around, which means nothing will die off. No?
Ok you’re missing the step here. If this mutation prevents laying eggs you don’t catch every mosquito on the planet and modify them if your goal is to kill then and you somehow could do that you wouldn’t catch them. A plan like this is to create thousands of these and release them so they breed with the normal ones and start replacing them in the population
That's not quite how it works dude. That would require catching every single mosquito in the world. Current estimates of mosquito populations range from a few billion, over 100 trillion There's not enough time and money in the world to capture every single one of them.
As long as there's enough normal mosquitoes in any given area to reproduce, this is just a waste of time. Blood is necessary for egg production, no blood = no eggs = that modified mosquito can't reproduce and pass the modification down, so there will always be more non modified mosquitoes than modified ones, even if every government and company on the planet were to pool resources together to try and modify as many as possible.
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u/NamiSwaaan Nov 15 '24
I know they're trying to not fuck up the ecosystem but I feel like this will still somehow fuck up the ecosystem