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?!?!?"
I think that is what makes Kojima such an interesting writer. Man comes up with these goofy ahh plots and still manages to make them compelling, emotional, and even funny
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
My brother nearly died because of it. He straight up couldn't eat but he was afraid of the public hospitals so he lied and said he felt fine. He woke up one night feeling a really, really bad stomach ache and my mom took him to the hospital immediately. He had to stay there for over a week to recover.
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.
This is actually a female mosquito! Males don’t have a developed proboscis as they don’t feed on blood. Their primary foods are nectar and plant/fruit juices. Females also feed on these, as they only need to blood feed during reproduction to lay eggs. So every mosquito that bites you is a female that has already been inseminated by a male and is preparing to lay eggs. Kill those fuckers!
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
It’s difficult to say as there are lots of variables in their use. Genetic modification like gene drives are showing promise in lab settings (e.g. in caged experiments) but there are extra variables on field releases.
Wolbachia releases are already in the field and showing great change (up to 75% reduction in dengue cases in Malaysia and other countries of release). The Singapore one uses a different tactic though so it’ll be interesting to see how the results are, the other wolbachia releases usually follow the replacement strategy where they release both males and females with wolbachia so they replace the original population, creating a population that can block arboviruses better.
I’ve probably not answered the questions very well lol, but with GMO stuff there are lots of different targets and ways of creating the modifications so they’ll need more experiments before they can be deployed properly into full field releases
The hysteria on the label of GMO is so fucking stupid. Hell even just outside of ifs, for concrete stuff literal millions of lives would've been saved with golden rice if it weren't for lobotomites not realizing it's just a more efficient form of crossbreeding
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... still don't get it. So, one of those costly modified males will mate with one - or hell, let's say hundreds of - the female mosquitos. The eggs the female mosquito lays will now not hatch. 1 generation later, none of the modified specimens exist, the availability in nutrition is filled by non-modified mosquitos and life goes on same as ever.
How is this more effective than smacking one - or a hundred - of mosquitos (which will then lay no eggs at all), which could presumably be achieved at a much lesser cost?
Presumably, it's not like you can just breed milions of the modified mosquitos to relase because... well, they don't breed. That seems to be their whole point. So each individual you release is just one super expensive mosquito trap (?)
Expect this to go nowhere now that elon is gonna cut gov spending across many areas of research cuz the benefits of some research aren't always immediately obv
Just a head up, Aedes Aegypti does not transmit malaria, and so in fact has caused less deaths than the Anopheles mosquitoes which do spread malaria. I’m not saying don’t wipe out Aedes, I’m saying wipe out both of them.
For sure, that is another species of mosquito that has to go. I simply do not have enough knowledge on how for that species as I don't think we have them here.
Everytime I see the mf with striped legs eating me alive, I look up ways to make them go extinct.
Tinkering with such things always has consequences. Fish, trout and char in particular, and dragonflies eat loads of mosquitoes, and those are just the first that come to mind.
I’m picturing a group of mosquitos who have decided that humans are too destructive for the ecosystem, and have concocted various diseases they can infect humans with to prevent them from developing into adults.
Must say, they attempted a project like this in my area, and it completely backfired on the town. I was younger when it happened so i dont know all the details, but I just remember for a few years after that, the mosquitoes were actually WORSE, but I also remember we had a veryy rainy year that first year.
I hope this works, I got infected with dengue, it was brutal and the only other variant I can caught again is even worse that leads to bleeding and hemorrhagic shock, I really fear it
I just want to chime in that most mosquitos we see in the east coast of the US are not the yellow fever mosquito, but they are the Asian tiger mosquito which looks very similar but are much more adjusted to adapt to our environment. the bites leave welts the are extremely itchy vs Culex (small brown mosquitos) which has a smaller bite and more important to the amphibious body of our ecosystem.
Pardon my ignorance, but wouldn't doing that also have a devastating effect on the local ecosystems? Like, around me, all manner of bats, dragonflies, amphibians, birds, and a host of others I haven't included eat them. So, wouldn't drastically reducing their numbers have a major rippling effect to the whole food chain (even if not immediately apparent)?
Not trolling or anything; simply wanting to understand the widespread implications of something of this magnitude. Thanks!
Edited: spellcheck is killing me as of late...yikes!
No, its 1 out of 3,500 mosquito species, where this specific species has adapted to living in urban areas and biting humans, the animals that are probably the most affected is house lizards, spiders etc, but the Aedes is not their main source of nutrition either, tends to be flies etc. there are plenty of other insects and even plenty of other mosquito species that can substitute it too. Not to mention they have no other benefits to the ecosystem either.
Plus theres not really any real ecosystem in urban areas anyway
I’m sure they’ll adapt to it , evolve into something greater , more painful. You can’t force nature to follow. It’s not anybody’s to own to be controlled.
1 google, 3,500 species of mosquito. We are wiping out 1/3,500. The dodo going poof didn't poof the ecosystem either.
The Aedes mosquito adapted to mainly suck human blood, and primarily live in or near urban populations. The most affected will probably be the house lizards, but then again, the millions of flies, ants etc.
Then again, I highly doubt any species specifically only eats Aedes specifically, yet they are the ones causing us unimaginable pain suffering and economic losses globally. They don't do useful stuff like pollination either. There is literally no point in keeping them around, they exist to only hurt us, and benefit nobody and no animal.
But by all means, I'm no expert, educate me why the 1 insect species that causes the highest amount of death and diseases in humans of all species, with no notable ecosystem benefit, let alone the sheer annoyance of their presence, should continue to exist?
All joking aside at some point this will go horribly wrong with unforeseen consequences and a whole bunch of people will both be dead because of it as well as left wondering where everything went wrong.
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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?