It inserts a dominant gene that impairs reproduction in future generations and collapses populations.
Funding for this type of research for all kinds of invasives would be helpful, IMO. Certainly seems better and more specific than trying to import predators also, who may end up preferring the local species over the invasive pest species.
https://www.nature.com/news/gene-drive-mosquitoes-engineered...
Having written that first comment: I was merely wondering aloud – without doing a tour du Google myself – whether such genetic intervention would be possible at all.
I cannot see many problems with sterilizing pest animals, as long as we don't define pests so strictly as to include any nuisance. For example, in cities in The Netherlands, feral pigeons are sterilized when population numbers increase too much. The article about the lanternfly also clearly specifies that small populations of lanternflies do not pose a problem. Any intervention would not need to "eradicate" lanternflies from the earth.
Perhaps you are referring to the suggestion of 'improving' the to strategy to produce non-viable offspring.
What is your own opinion on these matters?
The individual bugs may be hapless, but they are obviously just at the beginning of wreaking serious havoc on their new ecosystem and local agriculture.
It was technology that transplanted these populations in the first place. Eons passed without them migrating across the major oceans, then they suddenly hitch a ride on a human conveyance and arrive in a location without their natural predators, and start wreaking havoc on the native populations.
It just seems to me that this targeted technological intervention will solve the problem with the fewest side-effects. Gene-Drive is limited to not only a specific species, but a specific population.
Pesticides kill a broad spectrum of creatures, including many desirable species that are not invasive, such as honeybees.
Biological control, importing other living organisms to depress the population of a pest, can have even more massive spillover effects, some of which were mentioned in TFA, where a wasp that normally predated on the invasive was brought in and promptly preferred to predate on the local species.
So, what's your solution? Just let invasives take over and further trash ecosystems (beyond the existing human damage)?