Google Has a Plan to Eliminate Mosquitoes
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I should also note that samples of the eradicated species will be kept, so if it does turn out that it is a mistake, they can be re-introduced.
This was the go to solution in the 90s. Yes. Totally. At least in both Hillsborough and Pasco county that I can personally attest to. But that changed in the 2000s when the casualties of it were apparent. Now, it's only when too many phone in and complain about mosquito bites and mosquito traps show populations are too high in an area.
Unless you're in a really backwater county...cough...Dixie county...cough... Then yea, I think some commissioners don't care and do what they want. But it does go against state guidelines to just truck-spray all the time. But I think part of the guidelines also state when a mosquito trap finds one infected mosquito, it's free game to go nuts with the trucks. If I also remember right, only a certain amount of truck sprays are covered by the state per year (the chemicals, lic and maintenance is expensive). After the county does a certain amount, they have to pay out of pocket. You might want to FOIA the department that handles mosquito control in your county.
Are mosquitos the only insects that breed in standing water? If not, then wouldn't water-control tactics also cause a decrease in the populations of beneficial insects?
Frogs and some fish feed mostly on the larva stage of their lives (egg>larva>pupa>adult). The hormone treatment they use, can't remember it for the life of me, affects their pupa to adult life cycle. Something about screwing up the deterioration of the "shell" before they turn into adults. It stays hard and they are essentially buried alive since the hormone responsible to degrade the shell, so they can emerge, doesn't function properly. But that hormone, in the past 20 years, has not shown to affect fish, frogs or mammals, even down the food chain. There's technically 2 hormones, if I remember right. It was 2 years ago when I was hired to do a research project on prediction of mosquito migration and outbreak spread. My memory is not 100% on this. But one hormone is better to attack than the other because it doesn't affect anything other than mosquitoes. Obviously, "so far known". But it's also been a few decades since testing this at a pretty good scale. Only problem with this method, you only have a few day window of applying this in their life cycle. That's why consistent testing is done and it's used proactively, rather than reactively.
But some of the other tactics, is to speed up and help the flooding/draining process that happens naturally. There are waterworks programs that route water and keep it moving enough to deter mosquitoes, but not affect other wildlife (fish, frogs, other insects, fauna, etc). Those are technically the most effective, economical, and least likely to cause wide scale harm if a problem occurs. Plus, there's specific planting of native plants that suck up water fast. Then there's educating the public to not be retarded about standing water. Plus a few other minor methods. Mosquito control is not a one vector approach. The idea of "one action to rid them all" was shit canned long ago. Literally. The guide for mosquito control, that county commissioners and other gov officials here have to read, specifically mention that there is no single approach to mosquito control and no one should ever think there is one. It's been multi-faceted for many decades. At least in Florida. Other states, apparently, have not adopted that approach.
Edit: Shit, failed to explain my yes/no response. By yes, other animals can potentially be affected. But there is a conscious effort to use minimal concentrations of chemicals needed. Also, they don't intend to eradicate all mosquitoes. If the population of larva and pupa found in a body is deemed normal or below normal. No treatment is done. That way there's enough pollinators and food for the local wildlife. Also, if there isn't an outbreak too. When there's cause of concern for some disease that's actively being found, it's open season for mosquitoes until the outbreak is considered over. It's a really rough balancing act. It succeeds often, but you only hear about the few times it fails. Out of all the research, reports and interviews I've done with folks, it's a conscious balancing act and continual learning process with those in the field. But to be fair too, I only talked to professors who are active in research, CDC and officials in counties that matter. I honestly don't know what it's like in the hillbilly Florida counties. They probably still think bathing makes you sick.
I wasn't even aware this was a thing. I live in Phoenix. I thought you meant some sort of pest control, like a company coming out to a house to give a quote on an isolated problem.
Instead, a truck literally "comes by" and sprays the area, like a bug street-sweeper. Fascinating.
Probably happens in other tropical, poor countries as well.
[1] http://g1.globo.com/sp/vale-do-paraiba-regiao/noticia/2013/0...
https://www.csiro.au/en/News/News-releases/2018/Trial-wipes-...
At least two points are important: they're not eliminating all mosquitoes, just aedes aegypti, which are the disease carrying ones, and there's a huge opportunity cost in not doing something here. There's always the risk of unintended consequences, but you really have to have extremely severe ones in order to offset the known cost of this species of mosquitoes.
I'm actually very interested in hearing concrete ideas of what the unintended consequences could be and their cost, from actual experts.
Not all unintended consequences can be predicted let alone have a cost attached to them. In fact by definition unintended consequences are those we cannot forsee or prepare for in any meaningful way. Of course virtually any action has some unintended consequences but I think what the naysayers are saying in this case is that with something as complicated and untested as this, there is potential for massively negative unpredictable outcomes (maybe a new invasive species, maybe aedes aegypti perform some as yet unknown ecological function and their loss would be massively detrimental in ways we can't as yet predict etc), and there's some justification for that from human experience. This was the entire premise for movies like Jurassic park
But you're right. The moral of the story to Jurassic Park pretty much was "Just because you can science against nature, doesn't mean you should."
But to be fair to, ae. aegypti is technically invasive, to the entire USA. Ridding it TECHNICALLY is a good thing for the local ecosystems. However, I personally don't think the method they're going about it will be as effective as hoped plus it seems like a pandora's box of food chain chaos.
That's kind of where global warming would actually help. Due to the life span and mating cycle, along with egg hardiness, if they have a good drought for about 8-10 months. And then they do extensive hormone pupacide and larvacide treatment. They can nearly eradicate the entire nearby population in one year's time. However, a. aegypti have like an average 800m migration distance within their lifespan (if I remember that right). Thus, they can then do perimeter containment of certain areas to ensure no new migrations into their area. But instead, let's play god and engineer bacteria to fuck with reproductive systems.
This is super unfortunate, because it's why I came to HN in the first place. But unfortunately the site is becoming more twitter and less serious discussion.
Sign, that is not true at all. Especially when followed with "I'm actually very interested in hearing..."
Furthermore, your comment doesn't contribute to the conversation at all, which is why it was downvoted.
We had explained here (many times) what type of unintended consequences we could expect. Superficially of course (Don't expect a free 40 pages report about basic autoecology of mosquitoes here, this is not the place for that). It seems that a lot of people just do not want to hear about it. There are entire books written about this theme.
Do you have a link?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalyps...
So if we could target single species like this, maybe it would actually be beneficial for all the other species that are collateral damage in our current wars.
If the mosquitoes are all raised in a lab environment, and they are not descended from mosquitoes from areas that have been subject to this control, I feel like the risk would be significantly mitigated.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3128286/ (2011 - Australia)
What Google is doing now is to try the same scheme in California, on a much smaller scale, but with the hopeful option to go wide. The target is South-East Asia and Africa.
[0] - https://uknow.uky.edu/research/uk-research-spinoff-company-m...
[1] - https://mosquitomate.com/about-us/
[2] - https://blog.verily.com/2017/07/debug-fresno-our-first-us-fi...
[1] https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/study--gene-drive...
What is a tech company doing in the field of pest control? Are not the big pharmas, the big chemical companies a better fit?
The article states how Verily Life Sciences is a 'unit of Alphabet' and whose mission statement is:
"We are builders. We create tools that put health data into action." ~ https://verily.com/
I did not realise that Alphabet was into everything. No wonder they've been lobbying for military projects...Now I truly understand how distanced they are from their old Google roots.
We have caused famines messing with little things like this. Just my 2 cents. I think it is a noble idea, I find it hard to believe that alphabet Inc is in it for all the reasons they state, but I will have to take them at face value.
There are other ways, the reason you don't see them is because they more than likely require too much work, too much change or don't turn a profit.
[0] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2180055-mosquitoes-are-...
"Stupid idea" - you wouldn't be saying that if your kids were dying around you from something preventable because in some cases a non-native species of mosquito is spreading a deadly disease.
Mosquito abatement is not stupid, and targeting things narrowly here as they are proposing is even less stupid.
I'm serious - have you ever lived in a developing country, or even stayed for a few months? The cluelessness and heartlessness here of the entitled and privileged is kind of shocking.
Should we always let people with dying kids make important decisions? I'm not saying you're wrong, but this is a strange argument to make.
Ironically, what I've noticed. Those same folks go totally ape and over-react to even relatively modest threats to their OWN lifespan.
Your point is not wrong - the dying kids argument is often used in high lifespan countries to overreact to things. In this case I think it's not an unreasonable point however.
http://www.mosquitoreviews.com/mosquitoes-niche-pollinate.ht...
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/nea-release-m...
Vaccines, in general, make a lot more sense for diseases spread by human to human contact due to herd immunity. Since malaria isn't spread that way, vaccines in general would be much less effective. And the number of people you would need to vaccinate is massive (north of one billion), as well as any new children who are born (infants make up a significant number of Malaria deaths).
And of course, as many have mentioned here - this is not about wiping out every single species of mosquitoes on the planet. Just those few that transfer malaria, just in places they invaded recently. It is a good move.
Not that i hate them but they like me way more than lots of other people :|
Am i selfish about this? Fuck yeah! I hate them.
1. This is Verily, not Google, owned by Alphabet.
2. They are releasing male mosquitoes (that don't bite) in the area, where the species is not native. They are attempting to remove the species only from their unnatural habitat.
3. The headline is clickbait, as Google is not involved and no one is trying to eliminate mosquitoes "around the world."
In all cases I've seen of countering mosquitoes in any way, all researchers are aware of risks and take them very seriously. The goals tend to be similar to this one or have to do with eliminating the spread of malaria and other mosquito-transmitted disease.
In other words, not relevant at all. The money can originally have been generated by Google, and now it's invested in something completely different but that has the same ultimate owners.
People and investors can legitimately start new ventures with different missions that operate completely independently for all practical purposes. Nobody claims that The Boring Company is just Tesla, or that Tesla is just SpaceX, or that they're all just PayPal.
I don't get why people are so quick to jump on the assumption that because there are things they dislike about Google's business model or practices, the whole umbrella of Alphabet's hugely diverse set of businesses is somehow tainted by association.
Alphabet is a complex group of people, and the idea that its operation and behavior can be reduced to just a handful of controlling people is overly simplistic. You try getting 100,000 people to follow a single method or style and see how successful you are at herding all those cats... (not to mention how famously de-centralized Google has been from the start).
As you said it also applies to Google, and nobody to my knowledge ever claimed that all departments and all people in them a e.v.i.l., not even criticis of all sorts of things Google did and does.
Because Alphabet is Google. The only reason that diverse set of businesses exist are the practices previously at the same company. There is no separation like your other examples, they just changed the name.
However, they are different companies with different staff, mission statements, and overall goals now. Conflating them to suggest that an ad company is trying to eliminate mosquitos is misleading, at best.
Furthermore, Verily has its own profit streams, and isn't doing anything with mosquitos that increasing advertising streams to Google. The projects are unrelated. If I work on software and work and later clean my toilet at home, you wouldn't say the gloves I wear are my IDE and that I'm programming. However, I bought the gloves using money from my software development job.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/02/alphabet-business-units-reve...
Google makes the bulk of its revenue from advertising. Google generates substantial profits. The non-Google parts of Alphabet are, as a group, running at a loss. Google's advertising profits are used to subsidize Alphabet's "other bets."
Google is busy trying to maximize advertising profits.
Verily is focused in Life Sciences.
Different companies, with different goals. Verily isn't trying to maximize advertising profits for Alphabet.
I'm not side-stepping that point. I literally conceded it multiple times.
> It's concerning that massive public health projects ... are undertaken by a company ...
You're concerned that a public health project is being undertaken by private industry...but what concern is there? What are you worried about? I'm happy to discuss that. I probably share concerns regarding the same thing.
However, if a private company invests in public health, I tend to see that as a good thing. I also agree that such private companies should be accountable. This necessitates government regulation on private companies. I am for that, to the extent that the company can still do things in the interest of the public.
However, if your point is actually that there is limited accountability for private companies working in the public interest (or their own interest), then why conflate Google and Verily? It doesn't make your point more or less valid and contributes to a fundamental misunderstanding of the context around a given issue.
If that's really your issue from the start, then just say you think these types of things should be done by entities which are held accountable to the public.
Yes, and if I said the company that owns those was Alphabet, almost nobody would know what I was saying. Everyone would understand if I said Google owned them, though they actually don't.
That's a minor distinction without a difference in the public's mind. Alphabet == Google unless you care an unusual amount about that corporation's org charts.
As for your main point, I don't see a good solution. No one has heard of Verily. If we /s/Google/Alphabet/ in the title, that feels a bit like weasling to me. Everybody knows this company as Google. On the other hand, if we leave Google in the title, we get irrelevant (and worse) comments about search engines and ads.
Regarding your other point, I think the good solution is to accurately address the topic/subject, even if that means some people don't recognize the connection. If the headline was referencing Verily, instead of Google, then a good number of people would learn about Verily, right? Pandering to the uninformed doesn't help anyone, except in this case, the publisher, which was clearly going for clickbait.
I really don't think it's a good idea to favor inaccurate information over writing a few extra sentences (maybe just one?) in the article.
As a better alternative: "Verily Has a Plan to Fight Mosquitos in California"
Then in the article, something like "Verily, a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google's parent company, ..."
Boom, no false info, people learn who Verily is, and the world is better off for not leaning into clickbait and outrage-based journalism.
Only if you care an unusual amount about that corporation's org charts. Corporate mission statements are meaningless, except to an even smaller group of people.
Insisting that Alphabet isn't Google, is sort of like insisting that Puffs [1] tissues aren't Kleenex. While it may technically be true in some legalistic sense, a vanishingly small number of people actually care and colloquial language disagrees. People will look at you funny if you act like the distinction matters, because it doesn't.
If you are trying to understand what incentives impact the company, you have to address them specifically. Google is incentivized by the drive to make profits from advertising. This leads them to do many things that are predictable. Verily has different motivations, which change predictions about them. Their parent is motivated to make profit exclusively, so you can make predictions around that.
It absolutely matters when two companies are different, especially if you actually want to understand the situation, motivation, etc.
I'd agree that it doesn't matter to the average person who isn't interested in discussing topics related to the company, and colloquially, the terms are used interchangeably, which is fine. However, for discussing the moral, ethical, legal, etc, issues around the company, it's important to make the distinction to more accurately understand and predict future behavior.
In the case of this click-bait-titled article, it does matter though, as Google has a publicly understood identity, which has no business playing with mosquitos. Verily is in the business of life science, and therefore has plenty of business with mosquitos.
Conflating the two in this context first makes the company recognizable to the general public, probably the point of the mis-representation in the title, but second, it serves to lead the suspicious people on HN and elsewhere to wonder how Google is making destroying the environment profitable in advertising, which is so far from what's going on it would be laughable, if it wasn't so dangerous to the actual scientific and policy dialog that should happen around the topic.
They are point blank different companies.
Different CEO, HR, contracts, locations, resources.
The only thing they have are common ownership.
There might be some hints in strategic overlap.
They are more like 'different companies' than they are 'the same company'.
They could be peeled off from their parent owner and much would be the same.
Companies that are actually independent besides common ownership don't share a stock symbol and they don't comingle revenues.
It's legally a subsidiary and must have 'co mingled' accounting.
Also there's no reason for Alpha to break out revenues in their reports if they don't want to.
The whole point of Alpha was to in fact treat the sub companies as effectively independent, which is mostly what is going on.
Which is the point. They have much more in common than being simply owned by the same owners. They're a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet. And when Verily needs to raise money to cover losses, they don't go to the bank, they don't sell shares, they go to Alphabet.
No.
The sub is totally independant: governance, liability, stock holders etc.
Alphabet just has to report the sub on it's balance sheet, but otherwise it's like owning stock.
Now, Alpha does have a deeper relationship with it's companies, but they are still independent.
Google does not share information, money, talent, office space or much else with most other Alpha companies, so they are essentially separate companies with little to do with on another.
What Stock does one acquire to own part of this company? Oh, GOOG
The article is clickbait, the comment I responded to is misdirected outrage without a genuine effort to understand the context. This is a problem that is plaguing our society, and therefore gets me a bit worked up. It's so much easier to drop a snarky remark that is irrelevant to the conversation or doesn't actually refute any point than it is to engage with the context, but that's bad for society and the current conversation.
I generally associate Alphabet and Google because they are related. However, only through a parent relationship are Verily and Google related - and there is no "ad company" trying to "eliminate" mosquitos.
I tried to understand Alphabet and Google because I use Google products and care about what they do with the data.
Given an understanding of how they work, I see a lot of misrepresentation of their business model and lack of understanding around it. So I try to help with that.
On HN in general, there is a ridiculous level of mistrust for Google. I think it's good for everyone to be critical, but to be critical, people need to actually think and understand what they are being critical of. Instead, they often skip past all the thinking and go straight to worst-case doomsday scenarios. In this case, that means only reading the clickbait title of an article and assuming Google has some nefarious plot to destroy the ecosystem worldwide.
That type of behavior is dangerous.
People should be critical of Google. There are real issues with advertising revue, how that industry is motivated and incentivized, damage that can be done by the industry and powerful players, etc etc. When people don't think about and engage with the topics they are discussing it causes more harm, because it distracts from real problems. People in this thread are looking at the article's headline and questioning why an advertising company would try to kill mosquitos worldwide, which is a far cry from what the article is actual talking about.
These problems arise in a number of topics, I just happen to see it a lot in Google related articles and say something because I know more about Google than other topics.
Google was more or less just as much a holding company for a diverse range of other companies such as this Verily then as Alphabet is now, which is why the distinction between the two is considered so artificial by many here, an idea further compounded by the fact Google stock was converted to Alphabet stock and still uses Google’s ticker symbols.
Yes, instead of applauding the effort of solving a very difficult problem that could help people in real meaningful way, I am just going to go for cheap potshots to show how elite I am.
Thank you search engine company! Silicon Valley / PHP engineers really will save the world!
Plus they are a food source for many other animals, including birds.
In Florida, the state uses university researchers to try estimating populations of mosquitoes that can keep ecosystems mostly in balance, along with prevent too much outbreak in disease. Hell, a lot of the state workers are uni grads that deal with mosquito populations. Since the 90s, they've been doing pretty well with all the research gathered since the 1920s.
In this case, I bet we're going to get something similar to Mao's great ecological experiment with eradicating sparrows and whatever the other pests were. Not as severe. But, in a few years, "Yea, that was really stupid".
Humans have a very good history of fucking up ecosystems. We think "we know better" or "I have this great idea!" or even "I have this totally under control". No. We don't. We're morons when it comes to controlling ecosystems. I also find "I don't see how this can go wrong" to be a fault in logic. Just because YOU can't figure out how something can go wrong, doesn't mean it will not go wrong. Everyone has a plan until they get hit in the mouth.
Before reinventing the wheel, why not look at Florida's century long research into controlling mosquito transmitted diseases? All the failures and successes. The chemicals used only affect certain hormones that occur in mosquito life cycles and have not been found in other critters. Even with that, they use it as sparingly as possible. Only if larva and pupa populations are in excess of normal levels. "Outbreaks" are considered in the single digits in a week's span. And when they do occur, they're dealt with swiftly.
Just because you can't see the domino at the end of the line, doesn't mean it won't fall. I have no faith in silicon valley corporations. They've built themselves up on the platform that "We know best". What's worse, they believe their own bullshit.
...No.
> Wolbachia is a genus of Gram-negative bacteria that infects arthropod species, including a high proportion of insects, but also some nematodes. It is one of the world's most common parasitic microbes and is possibly the most common reproductive parasite in the biosphere.
>In early 2016, the [Eliminate Dengue] team discovered that the presence of Wolbachia bacteria in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes also inhibits replication of the Zika virus, in addition to dengue and chikungunya viruses. Since then, the World Health Organization (WHO) held an emergency session of the Vector Control Advisory Committee on developing a response to the Zika epidemic. At the session, WHO recommended that the Eliminate Dengue program proceed with pilot deployment of its Wolbachia strategy to build capacity to support operational use.
This is a well understood and widely regarded as safe method of dealing with mosquitos.
Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia
I don't know if exterminating mosquitoes will be good or bad for us. What I am saying is that we've got far bigger problems to solve first and in this case priorities do matter. What if exterminating mosquitoes will also exterminate various bird species? Well, some people might be willing to pay that price, but thinking of the butterfly effect, this being in the context of global warming and human driven mass extinction of animals, so can we really afford to exterminate animal species right now? And I think the answer to that question is no.
So eliminating mosquito might be a great idea, but I hope the people responsible for it will do their homework.
FTA: "It’s unclear what would happen if the world’s disease-causing mosquitoes were done away with. The ecological role that mosquitoes play hasn’t been thoroughly studied, though some scientists suggest we might be just fine without them.”
At least as reported in this article there seems to be a lot more doubt about what could/would happen than you suggest.
To explain what we don’t know?
Can you prove there will be no negative consequences?
They would be used somehow for better google maps data.
They carry p2p mesh network to deliver internet everywhere.
(Not that there's anything wrong with using PHP, I tell myself, while I author more PHP code)
The Four Pests Campaign is thought to have contributed significantly for the death of around 30 million people in China.
And fish eat mosquito larvae. So there's that. Anyone observing larvae in a pond's surface will notice that they will shake and dive whenever a change in lighting occurs. That tells me that they probably have non-aquatic predators. I'm gessing dragonflies, although I suspect these insects only prey on adult mosquitos.
I'm not sure of this. And that is exactly the point, because Google must be completely sure of what is doing.