this is like, the first thought you have when thinking about this problem. why would the females choose the infected one
Why would the females choose the sexy Cuban mosquitoes? I always wonder this.
Maybe they sing better songs with its wings.
Or maybe, because being genetically different is attractive for females. The bigger the genetic mix, the more healthy, disease free and stronger the offspring.
Or maybe they aren't choosing and just have a random brief encounters with as many males as possible. This is a question for an entomologist, but I would not expect mosquitoes behaving as humans in a prom necessarily.
It's really easy to anthropomorphize the mosquitoes or to anthropomorphize natural selection; we shouldn't ascribe that kind of agency to them.
Instead, reason about the consequences that we observe after the fact: perhaps the modified male mosquitoes are drawn from a different population than the local, unmodified males, and the groups have slightly different colorings. A random group of females might prefer the modified color, a different group might have no preference, and a different group might prefer the local color. After a few generations, the latter group will dominate.
That's not because the female mosquitoes or Mother Nature made any kind of effort to find mates with good genetic material. No such agency was present in the process. Instead, those random behaviors that incidentally resulted in selecting good mates were more likely to be passed down.
Of course they can, you don't need to sequence DNA to get an idea of genetic affinity, you have the phenotype.
I don't know about mosquitoes, but all higher animals obviously judge mates on genetics (based on the phenotype).
you're kidding. I mean to people of course all mosquito look the same. It is a top of anthropocentrism though to think that mosquito would not differentiate. The basis of selection is "best fit" (to bring in and/or bring up new generation), and the weakness to the point of infertility is naturally selected out very quickly.
Evolution quickly selects against reproduction or immediate survival failure, but this modification leads to successful male offspring which makes the scenario trickier.
Unless the modified mosquitoes are handicapped by something, they will be selected just like any other, as best fit metrics are superficial. Humans wouldn't be able to detect that a specific partner could only have male offspring unless it brought along visual defects.
If the population survives for many generations with a significant population of defect males, if there is a physical characteristic in the defect males, and if that can be detected by a mutation present in some females - the UV marker maybe? - then the female population should slowly be replaced by ones that select against the defective male. That's a lot of ifs though.
Theorizing is great. But once there is evidence the reaction needs to be to adjust the theory instead of arguing away the effects that have been observed since they are inconsistent with the theory. "You're getting it backwards" is exactly that.
Mating discrimination is real, but redefining "attractive" mates isn't just a single mutation that is implied in survivors like regular "survival of the fittest".
Redefining behavior of a specifies is a hell of a lot more complicated, especially if it's not just a simple matter of making presence of a certain smell a turn-off.
> Theorizing is great.
And all we can do for a few years until we get the most recent results, all we can do to interpret them, and all we can do to iterate on them.
There is actually evidence to the contrary of your position. The grandparent post mentions mating discrimination.
I don’t think it’s weird to assume mosquitoes won’t be able to tell the difference. It turns out that was wrong, I hope it’s taken into account in this experiment.
“A fluorescent marker gene that glows under a special red light. This allows researchers to identify GM mosquitoes from wild mosquitoes.” https://www.cdc.gov/mosquitoes/mosquito-control/community/si...