This sounds like one of those headlines that shows up before one of those movies like 28-days later.
I'm all for trying to fight disease but how deeply do we actually understand what we're trying to solve. How do we know that we actually aren't going to make things worse down the road?
Something like 30 out of the 500 anopheles species are capable of carrying malaria. Only 2 of those 30 bite humans: A. gambiae and A. funestus. Eradicating those two would be sufficient and another species, one that doesn't bite humans, would take over the rest of their niche. "Bites humans" is not a sufficiently beneficial adaptation to be a game-changer. We can eliminate that trait and precisely that trait with surprisingly little selective pressure.
Most of the "whoops" tales we hear are people that didn't listen to their scientists telling them not to, didn't have scientists at all, or were from long enough ago that we can discard their stories as irrelevant in the same way that we'd discard things like "spaceflight is impossible" and "nukes will end war". We've now traced the food chain around malaria mosquitoes out to three or four degrees of separation, including things like their competitors, the diseases they carry, and the things they spread those diseases to. Their entire ecological niche is trivially replaced by close relatives that don't carry malaria to humans. They're not even common enough to have major food-chain or crowding effects like you'd see with ants, rabbits, kudzu, or sparrows. Everything that we can find says that the damage from eradicating these two species would be zero. Not "small", not "manageable". None.
Malaria-carrying human-biting mosquitoes are small enough and unimportant enough that we should be thinking of them as disease organisms rather than insects. I'm sure you're perfectly happy with the eradication of bot flies, polio, and smallpox; why not A. gambiae and A. funestus?
I am also wondering how mosquito populations are affected by increasing human populations. I can imagine with a lot of left out garbage collecting standing water plus being a food source could have given mosquitoes a unnatural advantage.
Garbage and standing water benefit all mosquitoes against non-mosquito competitors. We only need to consider whether biting humans benefits human-biting mosquitoes over non-human-biting mosquitoes, or separately whether carrying malaria benefits malaria-carrying mosquitoes over non-malaria-carrying mosquitoes; eliminating either trait would be sufficient. I believe that neither of these are powerful enough, meaning that the malaria-carrying human-biting species can be almost seamlessly replaced by non-human-biting or non-malaria-carrying species with no risk of the trait re-evolving or of the broader ecological niche, as tiny and unimportant as it is, failing to be re-filled.
Is it that surprising? Populations of animals that depend on humans has generally expanded with people. This applies to livestock, pets, vermin etc.
Mosquitoes are prevalent even in super clean places, btw. I used to live by a small creek in Austin, TX and in the summers I could basically never enjoy my yard: it would be flooded by mosquitoes (the creek would have standing water which mosquitoes require to reproduce).
It's fine being careful but this argument devolves all too often into some kind of religious nature worship. We are the dominant species on this planet. Animals and plant life - nature - have to conform to our wishes. Not the other way around.
I agree, more or less, but I believe that the "We can't possibly predict the effects of this therefore we can't take the risk" argument demands more urgent opposition. I argue that we can predict the effects. They're tiny even in absolute terms, and the uncertainty is well-understood and also small. And in relative terms - These small risks and effects are weighed against a half-million lives per year. I'd be willing to release kudzu or rabbits to save that many lives; eliminating mosquitoes has such insignificant risk relative to its benefit that that risk doesn't even register. Do it now.
I'd say the life form that dominates this planet are single cellular organisms, i.e., mostly bacteria. They have run this place for billions of years, deciding who gets to stay in symbiosis with them or not and most likely will continue to do so for a few billion more, long after mammals and similar life forms will have disappeared again. They inhabit the entire biosphere, at least 1km below and up to 50km above earth, filling every cubic meter with millions and often billions of them. They can "communicate" (evolve their latest genetic modifications) across the whole planet in a matter of weeks for particularly mission-critical mutations. Every other life-form just passes by.
The only reason we are the dominant species is because we have resources and ecosystems that can support us. The dominant species won't be so dominant anymore when ecosystems collapse.
Mosquitoes are responsible for millions of deaths every year, and hundreds of millions of infections often with severe disability. We understand stuff pretty deeply now. According to https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html eliminating mosquitoes would not cause major ecological issues.
So when you have millions of people dying every year from a cause on one hand and only vaguely specified fears of some nebulous future harm, the reasonable and ethical thing to do is to do what you can to eliminate mosquitoes.
We don't have millions of people dying every year in the US from mosquitoes and this is only about US policy. Millions die every year globally, but this decision will only impact a minuscule portion of those deaths.
Eliminating an insect that has been here for millions of years, part of the food chain, helping thousands of micro-organism to mix DNA and be exposed to various conditions, thus helping evolution... That won't cause a major issue ? Sure ? 100% Safe ? You swear ? No backies in case of totally destroying our environment like we always do ?
If you know of a proposal for solving the third world that's as cheap, fast, effective, reliable, and safe as - that has comparable expected value to - killing human-biting malaria-carrying mosquitoes, that's great! Please, PLEASE share it and work toward its execution!
Several Hacker News items regarding massive overall insect decline in general, and as far as I can tell, the general consensus has been that this is not a good thing. [1] [2] I think this is sort of where the concern is coming from.
The mosquito is a special case considering how it carries lethal diseases, of course. So to me, control is certainly acceptable (mass extinction, I'm not so sure either).
My guess is at any rate that this won't be a mass solution even if it 100% works -- applied at too much scale and a likely result is mosquitoes will develop resistance to Wolbachia (just as they have with chemicals when we tried massive control with pesticides). As a localized solution, this is intriguing.
Yeah but to be fair, I don't want to be selected for death.
If natural selection was at play, I should have died when I was 12 without my appendectomy.
Human are all about saying not today to the God of death. For them self.
So I just wish we continued this "not today" things, but with a broader perspective including not sawing the tree branch we are sitting on. Like destroying the entire ecosystem with our brilliant ideas.
No, I'm saying killing all the bugs is as good as a solution as cutting your arm because your have arthritis in your hand.
Plus, there is a lot of BS with this "killing millions" arguments. As I lived in Mali, and worked in Senegal, Uganda and Kenya, I can tell you that:
- people there consider it like a big flu. It only kills the very weak, others just have it like you have a running nose in the winter. And those people are weak because we destroyed their countries, we still leach them, so they have poor infrastructures and poor access to major resources, including food, clean water and decent hygiene.
- We have had a cure to most forms of malaria for several years now. Not something experimental or mysterious. I just went to the Pasteur Institute in Paris for that. You have protocols based on Malarone (surprise, it's not the preventive-only drug they tell you it is, it can cure as well). But besides tropical disease expert doctors, nobody will let you know that. And Malians don't have the money to buy it anyway. See previous point.
So mosquitoes are not the problem. The problem is that our system are killing millions.
Should we solve that problem by a collective suicide ? Apparently death of the mass is the popular solution to people dying.
This technology can't eliminate mosquitoes. It's literally just birth control. Some mosquitoes still mate with otherwise normal males and continue to produce offspring.
If it has existed without biting humans why is removing disease causing bacteria from two out of hundreds of mosquito species equivalent to eliminating mosquitos?
Is the selective pressure that strong that an animal family that generally doesn't bite humans and ouf of the tiny percentage that does there is an even smaller percentage that carries a bacteria that can kill humans is required for the entire families survival?
No insect is killed. The only change is that the mosquito doesn't carry a bacteria. Yet you equate that to the destruction of an entire species.
This sounds almost like a Creationist argument, like there is some greater purpose behind the existence of all species, or that each species is some kind of keystone keeping the whole spectrum of life together. I happen to believe that nature is not necessarily intelligent or benevolent. Not everything that is produced by natural selection is by definition good for the planet (or necessarily bad either).
No it's just that we are part of a delicately tuned system that balanced itself over millions of years. And we have the tendency to try poorly thought short term solutions that destroy everything. It's not like we don't have an entire history of screw ups to teach us. We should know better by now.
How many planets do we have? By my count it's one.
What's our track record on changing ecosystems to fix problems without creating worse problems? Zero out of how many?
I hate mosquito too, and they are probably useless, but no good engineer makes changes without a backup and a tested rollback strategy, where's our backup?
Not zero. Here are some changes we've made that affected the living things around us, but they were worth the risk 1 Indoor plumbing 2 elimination of wolves and other predators around us 3 elimination of lice and rats from our bodies and homes 4 vaccination
Eliminating wolves contributed to higher deer populations and an increase in the number of deer ticks that spread Lyme disease to humans. Intensive forestry operations also help to increase deer populations as they like the more open spaces that result from clear-cuts.
It's a bit different in that this isn't a permanent change. This won't wipe out mosquitos everywhere just yet. The infected males will mate with females, and their eggs will be nonviable.
Then the males will die, and wild males and females will continue to mate and produce viable offspring unless the process is repeated. There's plenty of room for finding errors and fixing them --up until all mosquitos are eradicated.
I wasn't trying to come across as an anti vaccination person. I realize just about everything is related to ecosystem, but what I meant by "changing ecosystems" was specifically related to introducing species and modifying species, not taking medicine.
Rabbits in australia are a pretty famous example, but I can't walk out my door without seeing numerous fails related to introducing plant species.
Sure, but the only possible side affect of eliminating smallpox was increased population growth. Different than introducing an organism who's evolution we don't control into the wild.
I think "zero" is being a bit uncharitable. What about plant and animal reintroduction programmes? What about culling invasive species? Use of firebreaks? Eradicating disease? Did you have any incidents in mind when saying active management results in worse problems?
What are you talking about? We change the environment all the time. Mostly there are minimal side effects. People are scared of the exceptions, because that is what gets the most attention. Its all just conformation bias and fear mongering.
I'm excited to see what this does to the food chain. Will it collapse? Will it kill billions? Find out on the next episode of humans trying to manipulate everything.
The problem with this argument is that it's throwing out some big numbers and bad outcomes, without making any attempt to quantify the likelihood of those outcomes.
Without quantification, this position is basically unfalsifiable. Plus, there's a trivial contrapositive that is just as valid: "what if allowing mosquitoes to live causes an outbreak of a new disease that is transmitted by mosquitoes and kills billions?". Sure, that could also happen. As with total food-chain collapse from reduction of population of a non-keystone species, it seems very unlikely. Contrast that against the almost-certain probability that 0.5m will die next year (0.1 Holocausts per year, or one Holocaust per decade) from malaria.
If we don't attach a probability to these outcomes there's no way of having any sort of meaningful conversation about them.
The last episode, where the honeybee population collapsed, left me on the edge of my seat. I can't wait to see what happens next.
edit: Seriously, wouldn't it be best to solve existing problems with direct threat to food production than to go off tinkering with new ideas and unknown side-effects?
Right now we're indiscriminately spraying pesticides that definitely have a harmful effect on the environment. All the evidence points to this being a better solution.
I suspect that’s in large part because of the headline’s officious use of the term “US government” as the actor, not to mention the completely sensational description of the bugs as “killer.”
Does “EPA approves release of infertile mosquitos” sound as scary? Because that’s what’s actually going on.
We make things worse down the road all the time. Its only that while the time goes by, we advance technologically to tackle on solving those things we made worst in the first place. Of course that makes things worse downER the road...
I am just wondering, are we about to discover what other insects etc. are being influenced by this decision, possibly with negative effects on a large scale?
Except this proposal is widely accepted in the scientific community with hundreds of ecological studies behind it, where as the Four Pests was just speculation by a guy who likely never studied any modern biology.
What i was using this example for, however, was the unpredictability of influencing an infinitely interconnected and complex system. In the case of the four pests, the influence was crude and especially myopic, so it makes for a wonderful example.
It is rare that the influence ends where we imagine it would. There are many possibilities for race conditions which i know i can’t even imagine.
This case it's probably being done to recent invasive species... As in the ecosystem was fine before they came, and will be fine after they're gone again.
How about: the ecosystem was the way humans nostalgically preferred it before the mosquitos came, and it'll likely be the way humans nostalgically preferred it again once they're gone.
Not just mosquitoes, this one specific type of invasive mosquito. There will still be many other mosquitoes after the wolbachia thingy is done. It doesn't work on most mosquitoes
I'm not sure why people are making a kerfuffle over this, entomologist have used this before to great effect. Cochliomya hominivorax, the primary screwworm fly, was eradicated from the US using very similar methods. Due to this, we do not have to worry about miasis or maggot infestations.
I mentioned this in another thread, but I think part of people's problem with diseases like malaria is that they don't connect it with any kind of visceral fear. The mechanism of death is a little vague -- you get fatigued, you get a fever, and then... you die? OK, I guess.
Rabies is terrifying; you devolve into madness and convulse to death. Botulism is terrifying; you become paralyzed and asphyxiate. Ebola makes you hemorrhage. Tuberculosis can literally destroy your lungs. Smallpox produces horrible painful lesions. Screwworm infestations are just kinda horrifying.
So people see malaria as something bad, but not something scary. Screwworm is scary to even consider, so people jump to agree that, yes, it should be eliminated, nature be damned. Malaria is scary too, but I suspect that it doesn't engender the same physical fear response in most people. Hence the debate about mosquitoes.
This sounds like the wolbachia release of aedes egyptai mosquitoes that verily or w/e did in socal earlier in the year. Not so frightening, since it's just a sterilization technique using existing bacteria.
> Suppressing the mosquito population of an entire city is likely to require the weekly production of millions of these mosquitoes. To reach that level, Dobson’s company must find a way to efficiently separate male mosquitoes from females. The company’s technicians now separate them both by hand and mechanically,
Sounds like a potential use-case for that mosquito zapping laser[0], which I've heard can target by gender.
This is kind of like neutering/spaying feral cats, and returning them to where they were found. They stop breeding, but continue to compete with others for resources.
> This is kind of like neutering/spaying feral cats, and returning them to where they were found. They stop breeding, but continue to compete with others for resources.
What resources are mosquitoes competing for in the environment?
I've heard this story before. I think it was on a documentary about the source of General Tso's Chicken (and I'm not making a joke), but I don't recall for sure... Do you have a reference?
If I could, I would drive every human-biting mosquito to extinction. Ecosystem preservation and caution in deploying new technology is nice, but human welfare takes precedence.
... the arctic tundra actually has the biggest mosquito problems in the world, because the land there is a perfect incubator for mosquitoes.
Mosquitoes control the migrations of woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou). Their massive herds in Canada are always on the move to find food, but in the summer they travel a lot more, covering greater distances and moving to higher ground, sometimes avoiding the best feeding sites, because they are trying to avoid the gigantic swarms of mosquitoes that plague the Arctic regions in the summer
The caribou are clearly bothered by mosquitoes, losing up to a liter of blood a week during the worst outbreaks, so if asked I’m sure they’d vote for eliminating mosquitoes, and given their population size and herd mentalities they’d likely come out to vote in large numbers.
Would be really cool if they were able to engineer a way to make female progeny inviable while leaving males viable. Seems like that would make the system self-perpetuating.
I heavily disagree with this decision from the US gov't. It's incredibly arrogant and selfish for a species to try and modify nature for an evolutionary advantage.
This is not a genetic modification of the mosquitoes, thus I don't see it as "modification of nature".
We use bleach to kill bacteria, insecticides to reduce insect populations, condoms to negate the course of insemination, and breed animals and plants to have specific properties they might not otherwise acquire for our sustenance (cow, pig, chicken). Do you not consider these processes the same? If so, do you disagree with these, also? If these are not comparable, why are these different?
“Modifying nature” is the evolutionary advantage that has allowed the human species to develop.
Drawing a line in the sand seems impossible given our footprint on the globe. Instead, some educated analysis of the benefits and consequences of our decisions seems like the best we can do.
Why not use traps or if you really want to play with nature, increase the populations of natural predators - like dragonflies. Oh right, that can't be patented. On the other hand I'm quite curious to see how this turns out! It seems like the first mosquito that is able to produce offspring that are immune to the bacterium, either through adaptation or mutation, is something that should be be rapidly selected for. Tiger mosquitoes can lay ~300 eggs so any favorable mutation should be able to rapidly propagate.
I'm all for trying to fight disease but how deeply do we actually understand what we're trying to solve. How do we know that we actually aren't going to make things worse down the road?