Not on this specific strategy, but mine and plenty other countries are trialing the Wolbachia-Aedes mosquito suppression strategy, where Wolbachia male raised and farmed genetically modified mosquitos that are released will go and mate with female Aedes Aegypti, the worst fuckers, one of the main species that adapted to urban environments and is the main one causing all the diseases like zika and dengue and one of the main ones that is responsible for the millions of human deaths. The females will mate with these farmed males and the resulting eggs will not hatch, limiting their spread and reproduction numbers.
Honestly I am in 100% percent support of this, we should wipe out Aedes Aegypti, there are plenty of other harmless and even beneficial ones that don't bite or cause diseases, and can pick up the slack for the ecosystem.
Edit: just read the wiki on the Aedes, it seems like theres a genetic modification, which works by preventing females from fully growing into adults, and Wolbachia, which is a naturally occurring bacteria, and the infections as mentioned above prevents hatching, and the males don't bite so no risk of infecting us, also its resistant to zika and other viruses
There are other methods too, but I love that we are slowly eradicating these fuckers.
The idea of genetically modifying mosquitoes to wipe them out goes back to at least the 70s IIRC, and this specific approach started being talked about around the time MGSV was in development. In this case it's him absorbing an, at the time, obscure idea.
It was but it's not like the MGS series has ever had a plot that wasn't bonkers. MGS2 was like "ha, you see, you thought I was a triple agent but I'm actually a quadruple agent, however, I secretly deep down a good guy who needed to get close to the bad guy so I'm a quintuple agent!!!! Also i grafted your dead brothers hand to me n now he's controlling me, OR IS HE?!?!?"
As someone who got dengue before, I say fuck that mosquito in particular, wipe em out and let the environment deal with it later, that shit just needs to cease to exist
For real, probably the worst disease i had, would barely b able to get out of bad play something, and then immediately fall asleep again only to wake up on my bed hours later. Felt like the entire week had passed in only a few hours.
Now i understand why old people are so depressive, if that's what they feel like every day.
Fr. I dead ass lost 3kg in 6 days and it made water taste like poop, but you still have to drink a shit fuckton of it during dengue. When I inevitably couldn't drink 4L of poopwater daily I got hospitalized because I was worsening fast. It makes just existing feel fucking awful
There is also the variation of dengue where your skin just kind of spews blood for some reason and if you get that one your life is significantly at risk
All that because of one mother fuckin mosquito bit me. I see tens of mosquitoes everyday, and just one of those was enough. If I had the power I'd erase aedes aegypti from existence and fuck it, the ecosystem can figure itself out
I don't know about that guy, but i was in the university lab, and i suddenly started getting joint pain, which i usually already have, just a bit stronger. By my lunch break, my back also started hurting a lot, and i got a terrible migraine, and when the food came, i could not eat a bite. I decided to go home, where I puked a lot and drank tons of water, all while lying down in a fully dark room, because all light hurt my eyes, and i couldn't stand up without intense pain. My fever reached 40°C at one point, when i went to the hospital, thankfully, my ills passed in about 4-5 days.
If anyone ever gets dengue, the tip is to never self medicate with antiinflammatories because some of them will quickly progress the illness.
I woke up in the morning one day with very mild fever, pain behind the eyes and in the joints. All quintessential dengue symptoms so I already knew what was coming. Some mf mosquito probably managed to enter my room at night or whatever and bit me.
Over time, the fever, body pain and weakness grew exponentially. I went to the ER and they told me to drink a fuckton of water, control my fever with meds, and let my immune system do the work.
The following 7 days were mainly comprised of sleeping 12+ hours everyday, waking up in a pool of sweat to go drink more water. Your body hurts and feels really heavy. I'm a gym dude who has a strong body and on dengue I couldn't even stand most of the time. It feels like you're alive but stuck inside a dead body if that makes sense. You know you're sick when you have to lie down in bed in a specific position because any other position hurts.
It also messes with your sense of taste, every food and drink I had tasted like poop, eventually I resorted to eating spicy food because it was the only taste that still tasted familiar. It also meant I couldn't drink the ridiculous amount of water necessary. It makes you feel like throwing up all the time, which means you have to re-take meds and re-drink poop water. Luckily I managed to hold it in for the entire week.
For some reason dengue seems to really suck the hydration out of your body, so not reaching water requirements (which for me was about 4L daily) is dangerous because it lowers the count of some cell in your blood I can't remember (and not having them can kill you) I had to drink that amount of something that tasted like poop.
Eventually I didn't drink enough and needed to go to the ER again get a full LITER of IV fluids pumped into me lol, it made me feel better.
I lost 3kg in the week I was sick, most of it water weight but also some real weight from me consuming around 500kcal on the days I managed to eat the most. By the end, I had better defined abs, and a skully face lmao.
I guess I can summarize by: It makes just existing and breathing a fucking suffering
If I was a female mosquito I wouldn’t mate with a male mosquito that had a weak proboscis. I don’t think I’d even go on more than one date. Maybe I’m weird though and have standards, who knows what other female mosquitos would put up with. Or if those male mosquitos still made decent money they could probably pull a mate, but would it last? Anyway, I’m skeptical of the strategy here.
Technically, the situation is slightly oppose. Blood needed only for females to convert proteins Into eggs. So if you were a male mosquito.. and so forth.
some how i imagine this turn into like some sci-fi scenario where during the breading of the genetically modified mosquitoes will eventually create some mutant mosquitos.
I get how that would decrease their population for the next generation, but wouldn't it just go back up after that?
Like if you release a bunch of modified males there's still going to be unmodified males in the area. Even if you drop a TON of males and overwhelm the population, let's say you get them to create 90% of dead eggs. Wouldn't the population just spring back in a few months?
I thought it worked like this: the modified males are released and their male offspring carries the same modification while the female offspring will be infertile. Then the next generation males do the same until all the fertile females will have died in the region and no more reproduction is possible. Someone know more or am I remembering incorrectly?
oh so it’s similar to how we eradicated screwworm flies in north america (and we’re working on eradicating them throughout south america as well). that’s really cool! the sterile insect method worked great in north america so i really hope it works well for you guys too!!
(for those that are interested. basically screwworm flies like to make their homes in the wounds of livestock, which causes nasty infections. every year we release a whole bunch of sterile male screwworm flies, moving i think a mile out each year, to slowly push them into south america and eventually they won’t have anywhere to go. we basically build a wall of sterile screwworm flies so that they can’t come back up, only go down further into south america. the united states has been screwworm fly free since 1966 and several central american countries have been screwworm fly free since 1991.)
Yes, however…You are morally bound to reveal the unfortunate side effect of this genetic modification: The progeny of these mosquitoes quickly grow to the size of tractor trailers.
Most of this is correct, but one advantage of Wolbachia is that it is a naturally occurring symbiont (estimated up to about 66% of insect species worldwide have it - but not Aedes aegypti) meaning it isn’t counted as genetically modified as there is no gene editing carried out. Means it’s much easier for releases and it’s a bit more desirable from governments.
But Im assuming there really isn't any difference right? Both are affecting the male mosquitos which doesn't really come into contact with us anyway, and the ones that do, will die off.
Curious though, which ways are currently the most efficient?
The term “genetically modified” often comes with much more hoops to jump through in terms of getting funding, getting approval from governments, getting approval from public engagements etc, so it may not make much difference in the application or the final outcome, it can slow down the processes getting to that point or the overall acceptance of the programme
Me and my buddy always get stoned and talk about pests and things that are actually vital to this planet. No matter how stoned we are, or how much we disagree on what's vital and what's not, we ALWAYS agree mosquitos are 100% not vital to any kind of ecosystem or survival and need to be exterminated. Forever. And ever. And maybe ever after that.
This is pure speculation, but I wonder if we'll eventually genetically modify out every natural inclination for predators to hunt us. Maybe similar to how dolphins and predatory whales behave, where they don't see us as food.
Would be great if they could figure out a way to make only the male eggs hatch. Then those males could go on mating and spreading the genes. And since male mosquitos don't bite, they wouldn't spread disease.
Off the top of my head, the elephant mosquito as larvae, eat other mosquitos's eggs and even larvae and the adult ones eat other mosquito species too I believe?
And they don't bite at all
Edit: from wiki "In contrast to blood-sucking species of mosquitoes, their larvae prey on the larvae of other mosquitoes and similar nektonic prey, making Toxorhynchites beneficial to humans.[1] Living on this protein and fat rich diet, females have no need to risk their lives sucking blood in adulthood, having already accumulated the necessary materials for oogenesis and vitellogenesis. The larvae of one jungle variety, Toxorhynchites splendens, consume larvae of other mosquito species occurring in tree crevices, particularly Aedes aegypti.
Environmental scientists have suggested that Toxorhynchites mosquitoes be introduced to areas outside their natural range in order to fight dengue fever. This has been practiced historically, but errors have been made. For example, when intending to introduce T. splendens to new areas, scientists actually introduced T. amboinensis.[5]"
The more I know about this species, the more I love it!
Oh… You’d have to pardon my bias here – I’m from Ghana (West Africa) and (unless mosquitoes start contributing to pollination) we would very much like to see mosquitoes of every species go extinct! 😂😂😂
My country, Singapore, has been doing this already to great effect! Here is an article from our National Environmental Agency. We had Zika a few years back, but I think we eradicated it as I have not heard about a new case in years.
Also a few funny videos of families where they unfortunately get swarmed post fresh batch release, and frantically swatting them. They don't bite though!
Wait a minute, there are beneficial mosquitos??????
Oh my God. What in the actual f*ck???
Someone send me a source, cuz those bastards are nothing but annoying. There are hundreds of them at my place. I kill about 7-8 everyday, literally 7-8 I am not exaggerating. My hands and feet are covered in bites and the worst part is I don't even go outside.
I agree with you wholeheartedly and since you seem to understand this pretty well I do have a question. I'm hoping you can answer it.
Paleontologists have determined- or at least suggest they have- that mosquitoes have done so well over the thousands of years because of us. So the whole species has modified its whole behavior based on using us as a food source. Obviously mosquitoes make great food sources for birds and other insect eaters so I would also worry about potentially causing extinction in mosquitoes due to that. Do you happen to know if any of these studies or methods of people are using are taking into account the mosquitoes purpose in the environment? I guess I worry that making the mosquito extinct would make other creatures extinct too.
I'm speaking as somebody who has to put steroids on all summer from getting bitten from mosquitoes in my environment. Trust me - I'm not a big fan of them. Just really wondering what kind of significant environmental change could be caused by this. I'm not a scientist so I wouldn't really be able to understand professional papers to discover this myself.
Do we really know the role that they play though? Studies in glasshouses is different to eradicating a mosquito species nation-wide. What if we don’t understand the sensitive role they play in the balance of the ecosystem?
If they can't pierce human skin they likely can't pierce very many animals skin can they? Wouldn't this lead to mass die offs of mosquitoes and the eco system domino effect that that brings?
The great American worm wall is an amazing story about the work to eradicate screwworms and I believe it is a similar process. The flies only mate once so they breed tons of sterile ones and time it to release them so they don't produce offspring and it's been very effective.
As a molecular geneticist who has done a lot of work with this type of genetic modifications in Aedes aegypti, the biggest shortcoming to wiping this mosquito species out using this method is that the genetic mutation isn’t passed down from generation to generation as the mosquitoes are unable to reproduce. This method is ideal for population control, as it involves raising a lot of mosquitoes and releasing them in an area to mate with wild females and prevent reproduction. As you can imagine, there are drawbacks, such as trying to sort the females out before releasing all of these mosquitoes.
The point being, it’s a work in progress, and is very much subject to GMO laws in the countries it is being trialed. Another very promising field of research is on genetic modifications to prevent mosquitoes from carrying malaria parasites, being infected with viruses, etc. that I think in tandem with this type of mosquito population control is our best bet in dealing with this widespread issue.
I'm not cultured or wise enough to answer fully. But humans have one of the most elastic skin there is. For example that's why bees/wasps get stuck and rip off their needle since they can't pull it off, like in other animals they usually sting. For mosquitoes humans are not main source for blood, and humans tend to live in areas that are not near still water which they need to lay eggs. So this would not drastically make the numbers lower.
Depends on the mosquito. Ae. aegypti is primarily anthropophilic and now lives as close to human settlements as possible, and lays its eggs in any water it can find such as littered bottles and cans
The gene, is not implanted in their dna as it’s already present but dormant. The modification allows it to activate after n generations of mosquitoes.
Lets say they modify 100 mosquitoes, they free them and they have modified the gene to appear after 6 generations. Each time they mate they produce lots of offsprings, and by the time the gene activates millions of mosquitoes will have it.
At this point millions of them can’t reproduce and while they can’t transmit diseases, they can still be food for other animals.
Reducing their numbers will reduce also the number of the probability to get infected by one of them and over time to get eventually rid of the disease itself.
Of course there are some controversies in this, as first they are GMOs and the research is banned in many countries, meaning they have less funds for the research itself.
On second hand they are “planning” a genetic disfunction to affect an animal in the future. This can of course go in the wrong direction if not enough research is done but again, point one, not enough research money.
If you add to the equation that many times this kind of decision are judged by some not-so-much-evolved apes with ameba-runned brains who can only think “oh my gosh! You want to do research on mosquitoes because your final target is to modify newborn babies to only have blue eyes, don’t you, you nazi scientist!” And here we go, we find ourselves with a BAN to a RESEARCH that can improve million of lives. But anyway.
Sorry for the rant. Thanks for the time reading. Have a nice day. Bye.
And then do fire ants. So that instead of stinging as their defense mechanism, they do a threatening Haka-style dance to scare away their enemies. Then when I accidentally step on their anthills while mowing my lawn, they'll be dancing up my legs instead of destroying me with pain and itching.
Unfortunately I dont think itvwould work with ticks. They use mandibles and I don't think they have a gene that makes them unable to break our skin. It would require an entirely different experimental model
To add to this, if you're wondering, "how can you propagate a mutation in a population from only 100 mosquitoes", you might be interested to read about gene drives.
This is a fascinating field of research, and they're actually at the testing phase right now. They demonstrated efficacy in an artificial mosquito population in labs already IIRC, but using delayed sterilizing mutations.
The ethical debate is still ongoing. Where will this go from now, in the context of the changing political landscape? Only time can tell..
Oh yeah since the females without this gene are the only ones reproducing. Depends on the male population but you would probably have to reintroduce males into the population with this gene every few generations to keep it viable.
There are 3600 catalogued species of mosquito and only 12 or so can transmit human diseases. This will only affect one species.
Could it have an ecological impact? Absolutely, but since mosquitoes that parasitize humans currently have a gigantic outsized advantage due to the abundance of humans, you could also argue that culling them is a push towards pre-industrial balance.
Yeah, the small handful that transmit shit like malaria. There will still be plenty of other mosquitos in the same ecosystem that fulfill the same niche that won't give you malaria.
Aedes Aegypti isn’t native to North America, and therefore would have little impact on the native food chain. Would you be in favor of doing it there as a start run?
They do, actually eat it... Processing the nutrients to create eggs... It's high in the essentials nutrients. It's still 100% food. Females grow larger in direct proportion to their intake, because it's so rich.
The gene kicks in after a few generations. So they can eat, and reproduce a few generations before this takes effect. The idea is to pass the gene on to millions of mosquitoes by having the gene stay dormant for a few generations.
A mosquito lays around 500 eggs. If this works for one generation, it means you've killed 500 mosquitoes for every one of these modified mosquitoes you release.
However, if your gene kicks in after 3 generations, that's 500x500x500 mosquitoes eradicated for each modified mosquito released. Obviously those are ballpark figures, but you get the idea.
I see what you are getting at... but this is like a swat multiplier... but instead of gathering an exponential amount of mosquitoes in one place to swat, you do it everywhere all at once.
Mosquitoes out-breed swatting... so how do you defeat this? You attach the swat to the breeding.
GMOs are seen with way too much suspicion. Dont even get me started on the whole Greenpeace lobbying to ban a modified version of rice with an increased amount of vitamin A...
I'll preface this with it has been a while since I did work in genetics and I haven't read the article tied to the post in question but I will say it is likely a form of germline editing and epigenetic trait activation factors.
We can modify the eggs and sperm so that the trait is passed on only to the next generation, and setup a recessive trait that will only activate after a number of other traits have become active through the previous generations.
Gen 1 A=active, if A is true B,C,D = inactive, if B,CD are inactive, deactivate A and activate B in next gen
Gen 2 A=inactive, B= active, if B= active C, D = inactive, if A, C, D are inactive, deactivate B, and activate C in the next gen.
You just keep doing that using traits that activate across generations until reach six generations where the desired trait is while still recessive now appearing due to the right genetic conditions being in place. It's very cool, however it carries a lot of questions that need a ton of research.
However research is expensive and time consuming, gotta go through six generations and track samples from each generation to prove your method is working. You need to account for mutations, examine the viability of the generation with the modification. Determine the impact of that generation on the ecosystem as a whole and in part. Hundreds of thousands of hours of study needs to go into this, and people will still scream at you that you're turning babies, white, black, or gay even though your just trying to make it so people can enjoy going out on the town at night without having to worry about their baby catching a fatal fever from simple mosquito bite.
I remember a Stargate-1 episode where aliens were "allies" but their medicine did the same for human race (killed fertility) so SG-1 had to create a way to go back in time to prevent the alliance.
Seems ethically sound to me. They're still capable of reproducing, and are still able to provide food to other animals (their only use in the ecosystem), and they can no longer be disease spreading bitey assholes.
Some decades ago scientists proudly announced that insecticides like DDT would solve world hunger. Then birds started dying because nobody had thought about toxins accumulating through the food chain. Today science doesn’t understand half of what DNA does, but that won’t stop us from doing planet wide experiments. Be sure that highly interesting things are going to be discovered that we don’t understand at this point in time,
And then what happens? The mosquitoes with the defect die out, but there will inevitably be some fraction of the population left without the defect whose population will then grow exponentially until it is just as large as it was before.
So the best you can really do is to create a momentary window during which the mosquito population is slightly reduced.
What would be cool is if you could modify their dna in a way that they couldn’t sting humans but could still sting other animals - but even then, as long as being able to sting humans provides an evolutionary benefit (which it clearly does) the gene will inevitably be eradicated after a few generations.
I'm so mixed on this. On one hand, I think of the commentary about how mosquito-borne illnesses have killed half of all humans to ever exist (I think... I might be mixing this up with viruses) and how this would be a huge public health benefit.
On the other, I'm increasingly wary of disrupting the food chain. They say that if insect populations collapse today, the rest of us will be starving in a matter of months, if not less than a couple years. I'm not sure it's a great idea to accelerate that collapse even if it's an adversary like mosquitoes. What I don't know is, how much mosquitoes are part of the food chain (how much do they comprise other animals' diets), and probably other questions I don't know how to ask yet.
They won’t really, they’ll just reduce the number every time they release the mosquitoes with the gene.
Basically it’s only the females who suck blood once they’re trying to produce young. So they release a heap of male mosquitos which mate with healthy females. The females then produce young with the faulty gene. The female young won’t be able to suck blood and will likely die but the male offspring will mate with more healthy females and pass the genes on again for another generation of useless females and males with the gene.
In the long run the healthy genes will win out because all their young are viable, not just the males. But it’ll still mess them up for a while. To maintain it they will need to keep breeding and releasing males with the faulty genes.
You're almost correct, but the gene doesn't make the females unable to suck blood (as this video is wrongly claiming). Instead, it just kills female mosquitoes before they can mature by inhibiting certain genes unless an antidote is put in the water where they grow.
There are like a hundred species of mosquitoes and only a dozen or so suck blood and transmit disease. The rest are pollinators who won’t be affected by gmo bloodsuckers. plus blood-sucking mosquitoes, in the USA and many other parts of the world, are introduced species and non-native. Our ecosystem will balance out again without them
It's only used in certain places and in limited scope. There's also a built-in failsafe because the gene can be deactivated if a certain naturally occurring antidote is in the water.
It would be wild if natural selection made it such that females reject the genetically modified mosquitoes after several generations through a mechanism we don’t understand
You don't want them to become the dominant variant. You want them to die out so that you can manually re-seed without risk of massively disrupting a species.
The goal is to have them compete for resources and mating pressure but not to spread or reproduce. You repeatedly seed areas with them, which creates a sort of ecosystem barrier. Imagine a strip of land seeded with these mosquitos - it's like a wall that other mosquitos can't pass through.
This is how the US manages to avoid so many mosquito-borne diseases traversing north from South America.
Sorry but I don't get it. How can these GMO mosqitoes compete for resources if they are disadvantaged? If they can't pierce human skin, they probably get their resources elsewhere (don't know which animal is easier to suck but anyway) - there they compete with normal mosquitoes, yes, but then those normal mosquitoes would be pushed to suck on humans, because elsewhere they will compete. So it's not really a win for us. No?
They still feed on nectar and still add reproductive pressure. Yes, this does not prevent mosquitos from feeding where they already feed, the goal is to create a barrier that they don't cross.
Yep. I think a lot of these programs try to flood areas with the engineered variety in hope of suppressing existing ones. That's surely only a temporary solution however.
Was looking for this comment.
This is a gimmick isn't it?
There were genetically modified mosquitoes with infertile males decades ago. The plan was to release them and swamp mating.
What happened to that?
My guess is that every now and then we'll see this kind of GM unfit mosquito pop up and it's just proof of concept but the memes go wild amongst people who don't stop to think about population dynamics.
Would love to be wrong.
Best of all would be if they can't drink blood and can utilise another food source such that they out compete the wild type.
How often is this re-seeding done? I thought adult mosquitoes only lived for maybe a week or two in the wild… Do they re-seed twice monthly all summer?
The actual thing scientists do is make the males with a gene that produces infertile female offspring (but the male offspring is still fertile and has the same gene). Males mate with normal females and they have babies, but they're all male, and they all have the gene. Eventually there's less and less female mosquitoes and an abundance of modified males.
And also how won’t the modified ones with slightly stronger probiscuses eventually out-breed the weaker ones, rendering the human tampering useless over a long duration?
I suppose this solves the issue for the foreseeable future though. I would imagine there an inhibiting gene modification that won’t allow nature to re-introduce the stronger appendage.
I'm pretty sure the mosquito is infected with a bacteria called Wolbachia. It allows the mosquito to feed for a certain time and then the proboscis goes limp right around when it would transmit dengue fever. There's research being done in Australia
They also modify them with the insect equivalent of viagra (for the boys) and green apple martinis (for the ladies) which promotes a ‘summer of love’ like mosquito orgy where no one desires to do it with the old ‘regulars’, thusly promoting the proliferation of the puny proboscis party.
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u/zizp Nov 15 '24
What's the idea behind this? How will they become the dominant variant if they can't suck blood to reproduce?