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Comment by Confiks | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if any of the genetic control strategies used with the Aedes aegypti mosquito [1] could be used in this case. The obvious difference would be that males would also be harmful to the environment in this case. The strategy could also be improved if actual non-viable offspring was produced, increasing opportunity cost of reproduction and spent energy.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4001467/

[2] https://www.popsci.com/mosquitoes-designed-self-destruct

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I would love to see this kind of thing done with the [0] pine beetle. It isn't an invasive species, but is killing off huge numbers of ponderosa and lodgepole pines in the rocky mountains due to the combination of forest fire surpression and unusually hot and dry summers.

The exploding number of pine beatles is commonly attributed to climate change giving the pine beattle a second generation of bugs every year[1]. A genetic control strategy that thinned the population I think would be really helpful at reducing their effect.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_pine_beetle [1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/03/climate-change-sends...

It saddens me to see how the pine beetles are killing off the pines, but won't they ultimately improve the pine populations by thinning out the weakest trees? And over the course of the next hundred years, give some more climate-resilient strains room to spread, or migrate?

I think part of the issue is that one of the consequences of killing tons of trees is creating a lot of dry, dead, flamable wood. So the weakest trees get killed off by the beatles, but then all the nearby trees are killed in the resulting forest fire, which hurts the evolution argument a little.

On the other hand, part of the reason that this kind of thing is so bad is that we fight forest fires so aggressively. In the historic past, as trees are killed off en-masse by the beatles, a forest fire would ravage the area, decimating the beatles population. Because these fires aren't allowed to go unchecked anymore, the beetle population can continue to grow.

You would think this is the way to go with any invading species since it would not affect the natural ecosystem.

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