We’re trying to stop bad mosquitoes by raising and releasing good ones
debugproject.com
debugproject.com
Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences before the Alphabet split-up) is a sister company to Google. This isn't Google, and it's not code, but a project to help eliminate mosquitoes by a bioscience company.
Right now the evolutionary pressure to do this is probably quite low as there is only a small number of infected males, but if that number goes up the pressure will increase exponentially.
Example:
If 1 % of males are currently infected with the bacteria, the selective advantage of a mosquito that can counteract the infection is just 1.0/0.99 (as the probability of mating with an infected male is just 1 percent), which is probably too small compared to other risks to produce any visible evolutionary effects.
If we increase the number of infected males to 90 %, the evolutionary advantage of detecting them soars to 1.0/0.1 = 10! This means a mosquito able to detect or counteract an infection is ten times as likely to produce offspring, which provides an incredibly strong gradient for evolution.
The question is of course how fast an immunity can arise (or if it already exists in the population), and how many generations of mosquitoes are able to survive after the infected males are introduced.
Probably they ran their own population genetics simulations on this, so I'd be curious to see results, which should give a good indication on whether this can work and if so under which conditions.
My personal guess is that it won't be effective, as there are very few cases where introducing a single external stress factor into a population causes it to collapse entirely, what's more likely is that it will adapt and relapse.
The bacteria isn't mentioned in the video, but I believe it could be Wolbachia, which is already pervalent in the insect world. According to this FAQ [1], it already infects 60% of the insect world, so it appears that developing an immunity to it might be pretty hard:
8. Do other animals carry Wolbachia?
Wolbachia is common among arthropods (including insects, spiders and other small animals with no backbone). Up to 60% of insect species naturally carry Wolbachia, including butterflies, dragonflies, moths and some mosquito species, but not the primary species of mosquito involved in the transmission of dengue.
Wolbachia is also found in certain types of roundworms – known as nematodes – but this is very different to the insect Wolbachia that we work with. Wolbachia is not found in any larger animals such as mammals, reptiles, birds and fish.
- [1] [ http://www.eliminatedengue.com/faqs/index/type/wolbachia ]
For the diseases mentioned at the link there are animal hosts (other primates) so it won't be as effective, but for something like malaria where humans are the primary reservoir species, the effect can be very large.
It can also be effective in lowering the rates of transmission in urban areas.
- An array of three microphones for locating mosquitos by sound
- a servo-mounted laser
- Software to combine the two, possibly with a manual mode.
Also, its sensors are smart...it can tell the difference between male and female mosquitos by beats per second of their wings. So that shouldn't be a problem.
Seems it is still a prototype.
Correction: This story used out of date information to claim that the technology had been licensed out. It has not been licensed to date. As well, it formerly stated that the U.S. Commerce Department paid for the company to showcase the technology in Germany. It just invited the company. We regret the errors.
> good bugs ... will stop bad ones from reproducing
? Are mosquitos monogamous (or do they just get really tired after sex, or do they transmit the infection to others...) If "good bugs" don't bite, I'd have thought you'd want them to reproduce as much as possible, so long as not-biting was hereditary. A non-reproducing population can never out-compete the reproducing rest of the species.
- [1] "Wolbachia-Aedes Mosquito Suppression Strategy" [ http://www.nea.gov.sg/public-health/environmental-public-hea... ]
Looks like they mate with females, which still lay eggs, but the won't hatch. So less bad bugs mate and produce offspring. Needs large numbers of good bugs though.
[1] http://debugproject.com/faqs/
[2] http://www.ebmedicine.net/topics.php?paction=showTopic&topic...
I've gotten malaria on a trip to west Africa, I've had to get yellow fever vaccines, i grew up in areas with west nile, etc I understand the impact it has on humans. However, there is more to the mosquito than the little insect flying around biting us. Their eggs and larvae play a huge role in the ecosystems they inhabit.
I think it's hard to justify drawing an equivalence between exterminating mosquitoes, which scientists have studied and broadly believe to be safe, and removing most of the plant matter from the oceans. I would not have downvoted you, but it's not hard to understand how you ended up there.
They are in fact the deadliest animal on the planet and unequivocally deserve complete eradication.
I'm also a fan of the idea of the idea of locating them with sensors and shooting them out of the air with a cheap laser. It seems like this sort of technology should get very inexpensive pretty soon.
Or is it that this has been proposed since forever but only now someone is talking of actually throwing money at it?
Edit: typos
From their FAQ it sounds like they have made progress on this front:
> What has Debug accomplished so far?
> We've developed methods for automated mosquito-rearing, and we know that we can separate males from females with high precision, and we’re continuing development of these technologies at larger scale in our lab.
Guy runs around with a ship that can destroy objects through all of time. Causing all of history to be rewritten. Trying to get his wife back after his home planet was destroyed. Manages to restore everything but his wife and goes mad trying to get that to happen.
In any case, it's not really comparable to idiots killing birds during the GLF, since it was a completely stupid policy based on no science at all.
Zika for example, has existed for thousands of years if not millions of years. How come just in 2015 there's this massive unprecedented outbreak? Just when Oxitec starts releasing their "good mosquitoes"?
What specifically changed and caused this outbreak?
- [1] "No, GM Mosquitoes Didn’t Start The Zika Outbreak." [ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/science-sushi/2016/01/31/g... ]