It is fascinating that the article does not mention this, if it is true.
She's been ranting about genetically modified mosquitos for as long as I know her, claiming it cannot and never will work, mainly because mosquitos have an insane amount of offspring and a very short lifespan.
They adapt so, so, so quickly.
A male mosquito lives a week, a female mosquito a few months at best, and they produce 300-600 eggs per female mosquito on average. Can you imagine the exponential growth and recovery rates of these animals? It's like sharing your grandmother with 45000 cousins, and each of your grandmother's 299 siblings has 45000 grandchildren as well. It's a big family very quickly.
There are stories of countries who tried to eradicate mosquitos and reduced the mosquito population to 1% of what it originally was, only to jump back to 100% within two years (or so, my memory is hazy) after the program stopped because politicians had declared the program a success.
Mosquitos man. I'm not sure we'll ever get rid of them. They will probably outlive us.
Also I’ve been reading up on how Gene Drives work, it’s very interesting but I’ll just leave the Wikipedia page here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_drive
Now I'm getting worried that some ancient space-ring turns up
Loss of habitat, for example.
One of the biggest limits is weather and climate. Mosquitos don't exist here in New England for half the year, but if we increase the temperature by 2 C, we'll probably be facing them for 7-8 months and they'll rebound harder and faster.
Mosquitoes are a key species, that feed in turn thousands of other animals: fishes, spiders, predatory flies, bugs, bats, frogs, birds, shrews... etc and suffer heavy loses by that. And they are also pollinators. Mosquitoes are connected with everything and will support everything.
So messing with them is notoriously dangerous. Playing football with a nuclear bomb would be safer probably.
What we need is a gene bomb. Create a gene that makes mosquitos more resistant to gene attacks, but 10 generations later creates infertility. Spend 10 generations dropping gene attacks to ensure those bomb'd mosquitos proliferate and reproduce.
Still, you'll never get all of them.
And yes it can be combined with a generational ticking time-bomb.
But that's a bigger ask than you'd think. Stuff moves around, on its own, and often, on humans and human artefacts. Like for example, mosquitoes breeding in a puddle on a boat.
This is basically a worry people have about gene drives, that they will jump from places where they are wanted, to wild populations that are doing nobody any harm, and eradicate whole species.
> In 1973, the Pan American Health Organization again declared that Brazil was Aedes-free. The second official eradication period did not last long. In 1976 and 1977, A. aegypti was found in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, Bahia, and then in nearly all the Brazilian states.
So, at least three years in their case. Seems you need to eradicate the mosquito from all the neighboring countries as well, otherwise they'll just fly in and fill the void. If you're interested in what they did to declare Brazil Aedes-free (twice), the full article is worth a read:
Some years are different than other. Last five years were particularly hot and 2020 was the hottest year registered.
Not to mention the wildfires, or the speeding deliberate destruction of the rainforest in the last four years.
Removing trees will remove the rainclouds created by those same trees, and removing the rain means that the place will dry and eventually become arid. Not surprises here.
In both cases we can expect some effect on an animal that breeds on temporary rain pools and lagoons.
Thus, the alleged effect of modified mosquitoes can be zero, or much lower than we think. This effect will be temporary, because mosquitoes are facing similar problems and dry spells for millions of years and they still somehow survived.
It's good to know that my intuition was correct and the field is basically over-promising to local authorities so they can effectively conduct funded genetic experiments in the wild...
Oh, wait a minute... No I'm not... That's a f*ing disaster waiting to happen.
However, the concerns about the critical publication are due to the very broad conclusions it makes. But the mere facts of:
- lasting genetic contamination of the mosquito population
- failure to erradicate the Aedes aegypti in Brazil
> According to Oxitec, the “OX513A self-limiting gene does not persist in the environment,” and that the “limited 3-5% survival of the OX513A strain means that, within a few generations, these introduced genes are completely eliminated from the environment.”
That is about the self-limiting gene. How about the other genes?