For The First Time, Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes Are Released Into The Wild

Bold but extreamly dangerous. Introduction of any new species is a bad idea, Cane toads in australia, Pythons to florida, the mongoose to hawaii i could go on for pages. is it certin that all mosquitos are 100% steril or will the gene pass through to 10% of the population continually decreasing the population for generations? affecting every specise that consumes the mosquito, shifting their diet to other species, therefore reducing populations. The Butterfly has flaped its wings now we can only wait to see the huricane.

Even though getting rid of a disease is great,there might be a chance of this coming back to bite us and like Mc_E_T said theres no going back.

Mc_E_T is ludicrous; sterilizing by its very definition means that the organism cannot reproduce. This isn't something that can happen "10%" of the time or "90%" of the time. Sterility is sterility. There is literally no chance of reproduction if the mosquitoes are, indeed, sterile. If they aren't sterile, than the worst thing that happens is nothing. As in, mosquito population sizes continue to stay at the same rate. Even if it fails, it fails safe.

Getting rid of those pesky mosquitoes would be great.

I don't think Oxitec should have been allowed to release these mosquitoes anywhere other than in their own backyard.

They must do a considerable amount of "offshore" banking in the Caymans, or at least enough to take a BITE out of the local economy if the government didn't agree to the experiment.

I absolutely hate people that object to killing anything that poses a threat to mankind, from sharks, snakes, spiders, mosquitoes, etc... It's selfish, downright selfish and negligent to preserve a predator/harm in order to preserve the ecosystem "just the way it is" albeit the cost to human life, - on that note, the ecosystem has changed over past the past how many billion years.

I feel everyone needs a reality check and stop overreacting.

@swiper,

The problem is that no person fully understands ecosystems--therefore it is impossible to be completely sure about what sorts of effects eliminating a species in the eco-system might cause.

For instance... I hate mosquitoes, but I love fish. If all the mosquitoes in my area suddenly disappeared, the amount of fishing I would be able to do would decrease since fish eat mosquito larvae.

I also hate snakes. But, if there were no more snakes, suddenly my garden and local farms might be overrun by rats and mice and other destructive rodents--this means food prices would skyrocket as the supply of food is decreased (from invasive rodents ruining the crops).

Yes, snakes pose a threat to mankind... BUT, the ABSENCE of snakes poses an even greater threat.

http://ufwildlife.ifas.ufl.edu/venomous_snake_faqs.shtml

now compare those deaths to the number of people starving to death each year around the world and then decide whether or not you think it's good to have snakes around to control crop-destroying rodents.

@swiper

No one objects to "killing anything that poses a threat to mankind", its the methods that are used especially if the results can be detrimental to the environment.

Getting 2000 volunteers to go out at night for a week and kill mosquitoes would do a better job. You would then be able to determine exactly what role (besides annoying)the mosquito population really plays (yes I know they pollinate). If it was a vital one, the population could be allowed to return to normal. If they were all made sterile, then what?

Use the over fishing and over hunting approach to the mosquitoes and I guarantee you would decimate the population.

@swiper you seem to be the only one overreacting. Relax and while your chilling out crack open a biology book and look over the section explaining the importance of the food chain.

Genetic material between animals is not shared as it is between bacteria so there is nothing to fear from entire populations of animals getting wiped out.

Also, the fact that this gene inclusion makes the insect sterile means that it can't pass on its genes--because quite simply there is nothing to pass on.

Manually paying thousands of people to control mosquitoes might sound like a great idea until you start adding up costs. Throw in a few dead people from Dengue plus the medical treament costs of keeping everyone else alive and the numbers start adding up.

The caymen islands are not a popular fly fishing spot, so there is little fear of taking a toll on a niche fish species. Furthermore Aedes aegypti is not native to the Caymen islands. Wiping out Aedes aegypti from the Caymens is ok. Wiping out Aedes aegypti from its native habitat would need consideration.

Are we all ready for the zombie apocalypse?

The photo that accompanies the article is not of a mosquito. It is a moth... probably a Pterophoroid.

Those poor bats. Who needs 'em? It's not like they're having a tough time or anything already. Let's just not give them any reason to come out at night anymore, shall we?

Rather than sterile males, they should try and breed male mosquitos who only produce male offspring. That would quickly reduce numbers.

@B.V Mosquitoes can't be the only diet your type of fish eat, sure, maybe the amount of fish you catch might go down (until they figure out they can eat something else, or they adapt to living without eating larvae) but atleast you won't come home from a day of fishing itchy with mosquito bites and a case of dengue fever

Snakes, mice & rats, If only it was that easy to protect your crops by dropping a bunch snakes on the outskirts, rodent traps are quite effective and widely used... From my understanding only about 3 or 4 species of snake pose a threat to humans in the US.

@kidkaboom22 - 2 million people die annually through disease carrying mosquitos (to quote PS) but oh hay "sorry to hear about your child dying, we just couldn't risk upsetting the environment to prevent his/her death"

The the argument might be, more people might die if we rid mosquitoes and break the food chain blah blah, I'd bet my money on 200,000 years of human survival though.

@swiper I'm not saying lessening the impact of a disease is a bad thing (my 1st post). At the same time this is a drastic move to release a transgenic organism into the wild.Like I said before if anything goes wrong it will be impossible to fix.Look at Monsanto and their seeds people in third world countries can't afford their seeds that also don’t reproduce.How are they suppose to afford transgenic animals its arrogance to think anyone can control nature.

@jeditalian
So every time you eat chicken, you grow feathers?

@kidkaboom22 - It's arrogance to think we can't control nature, aren't we supposed to be responsible for climate change for starters? (supposedly) then theirs green houses, dams, dikes, flood gates, farms, plantations, snow blowers, snow makers, just to name a few forms of us successfully controlling nature of the top of my head - I see it as a field in advancement, unfortunately we got it wrong with cane toads but lesson learned, science advances with trial and error, we won't know til we take those those risks.

I am waiting for that anti-mosquito laser that was developed by the the ex-star wars scientists.They built a working prototype from off the shelf parts purchased at Radio Shack,which suggests a production unit shouldn't be that pricey.

Man this is a bad idea and to @swiper we maybe controlling nature but we have no idea what we are doing most of the time since we have been wiping out species and because we need food but then we turn to an other one once we don't have what we use to have until its all gone (mostly fish).

Swiper, I wouldn't call dams a successful control of nature. Everything else aside, (and there are a lot) dams are killing fish that require the annual flooding to lay eggs. Around me for instance (eastern washington state) the dams laid down here are wiping out the sturgeon populations. Almost all of the population is gone from most of the rivers that have a dam on them. Of the rivers that have a dam and haven't completely lost their sturgeon population, the population itself is down by at least 90% and is on the verge of complete collapse. Fact is, we don't know what the hell we're doing and through our arrogance alone, I doubt we ever will.

@swiper,

"Mosquitoes can't be the only diet your type of fish eat, sure, maybe the amount of fish you catch might go down (until they figure out they can eat something else, or they adapt to living without eating larvae) but atleast you won't come home from a day of fishing itchy with mosquito bites and a case of dengue fever"

That's not really how the food chain works.

There are tiny fish that eat the mosquito larvae, bigger fish eat those fish, even bigger fish eat those, I (and everyone else) catch(es) and eat(s) the biggest ones.

There are LOTS of larvae, there are LESS tiny fish, there are VERY FEW larger fish, BARELY ANY large fish, and HARDLY ANY humans at the top of the food chain.

The mosquito larvae is the base of the food chain, the smaller the base, the smaller the # of top predators the ecosystem can support.

You might cut the base of the food chain pyramid only in half, and end up completely eliminating the food source for the top predators.

As for adapting to living without eating... that's kind of ridiculous and not at all how adaptation or evolution works.

I can't suddenly adapt from eating 2000 calories a day to eating 1000 calories a day (if fish populations decline, I might not be able to catch enough calories a day to survive).

You also mention man-made solutions to my snake-as-rodent-control example.

Sure, humans can set traps, etc... but that takes effort--which means cost. Humans can walk around with cotton tipped swabs and pollinate fruit trees by hand too... but can you imagine how expensive food would be if humans tried to replace all of the natural systems in an ecosystem?

An ecosystem is like a human body--yes, we can "replace" kidneys with dialysis machines just like we can replace snakes with human rodent trappers... but such actions are completely unsustainable in the long term.

i thought killing species had adverse effects on the ecosystem and like. Is all what they treat us in school wrong?

Why not completely eliminate disease carrying mosquitoes, and replace them with more benign strains to keep the eco-balance? The mosquitoes that carry malaria and Nile fever won't be missed.

I read that 50 million people contract dengue fever and that 50 thousand die from it each year. If the person's platelet count is low to begin with, say 270,000, and you lose 90,000 platelets per day, the person will start hemorrhaging in three days and die. However, there is a substance that can increase the platelet count so that the body has time to defeat the virus in four days. Another method is to use an electrostatic air purifier which puts ions into the air. The proboscis of the mosquito acts like a lightening rod which accumulates electrical charge and zaps their brain. There is some solar-powered unit that could be placed outside. Another method is to use the propane CO2 generator that attracts mosquitoes into a net. There they die of dehydration. We used one two summers ago, and the mosquitoes were fewer this year. Another idea is to use a bath of water in which the larvae can live. Then the unit releases some oil which clogs their breathing snorkel. On the market is a unit that detects the motion of the mosquito and zaps it with a laser pulse. So there are a lot of devices available instead of genetically modifying the creature.

DREAP! @SWIPER! SHUT IT!

some of the rest of you pseudo-intellectuals need to chill as well.

Man became the dominant species with ALL of those "threats" intact.

ALL life is necessary to ALL other lfe.

THAT IS the nature of ecosystems.

Remove from, or add to, ANY portion of it and you have initiated change.

AGAIN...Man became the dominant species with ALL of these so-called threats in place.

The current global problems that man is attempting to "Solve" are caused by man himself.

This is a very bad solution. Genetically engineering ANYTHING that may or may not reproduce is a fatal mistake.

MAN IS THE PROBLEM, or at the very least man's DESIRES are causing the problems, this much should be clear.

YOU CANNOT FIX THESE PROBLEMS BY DOING AGAIN THE VERY THINGS THAT CAUSED THEM.

Time to stop arguing over which of the two evils are the lesser, time to start getting out of the box we are trapped in (via the industrial revolution and personal tech) NEW THINKING, NEW SOLUTIONS, NOT THE SAME OLD ONES WITH "better tech" Time for a new revolution, Time for a new tech, the old ones (including present developments) are toxic.

Lets try again, THIS TIME with some respect.

Mankind has been genetically engineering animals for thousands of years. Look at the chihuahua.

If they're genetically engineering mosquitos now, why not go a step farther and introduce GM mosquitos that instead of carrying diseases and viruses carry vitamins or vaccines? Sure, I know the article is about population control to curb disease, but theres still hella mosquitos that will be around even after the sterile ones do their job. Wishful thinking perhaps?

Neat process for population control with very minimal environmental impact. But what about instead of relasing a large number of sterile pests, why not release a large number of pest-eating animals? For instance, a large number of bats released into the wild would certainly directly affect the mosquito population. Meanwhile, bats tend to live in places (largely caves) that very few species (including humans) consider good real estate.

This is how zombies get made. Just saying..

Someone please correct me if i'm wrong here...but..

doesn't "transgenic" mean that there are the genes of two different species of animal spliced together? Ie. dog with jellyfish gene, goat with spider gene etc?

It seems to me the term "transgenic" is being misused here, shouldn't it be "G.M.O. Mosqitoes into the wild?" as in Genetically Modified. I don't see where any new outside genetic information was added, it appears they just removed the gene that made the mosquito fertile....thoughts?

@Dreap I don't think the major concern is whether or not the male population is sterile. The bigger concern is the effects that introducing a GM organism into the wild might have on us.

It is unpredictable. If a GM organism's DNA can be 2-4% different from its natural parent and can cause holistic and not-well-understood changes among large numbers of native genes (there a studies to suggest up to 5% of the natural genes are altered) then I am pressed to see how this experiment could not have serious consequences.

So to say this experiment fails safely is not entirely accurate.

don't all living things have a puropse? and swiper, you're and idiot.

Dreap has it right. This should not affect the ecosystem. They simply sterilized some males genetically and released them into the wild. Sterilization of males to suppress mosquito populations has been going on for awhile. They just did it by irradiating them instead of modifying them genetically. But irradiated males have trouble competing with wild males for females. Releasing sterile genetically modified males does not change the wild population gene pool. Its like sending out a bunch of males that have gotten a vasectomy to mate with the females. Therefore you have less offspring per mating overall. Wild males still produce offspring. Mosquitoes would not be wiped out. Just like the article says this will suppress the mosquito population just like insecticides, only without all of those nasty chemicals that really mess up the ecosystem. Transgenic mosquitoes are better for the mosquito system because if we don't use them, stronger insecticides will have to be used as mosquitoes become resistant to them. These insectides are more likely to cause problems than some sterile mosqutoes.
And if it crosses your mind that we shouldn't suppress the mosquito poulation, please think about the children in Africa and South America sufering from Malaria, Yellow and Dengue fevers.