I’m a little dumb. Can you help me explain what’s going on here?
They released a bunch of genetically modified mosquitoes, that sabotage reproduction and decrease the mosquito population.
About 3 years later, malaria was found in the same area as the decreased mosquito population.
Are you suggesting that they genetically modified the mosquitoes to have malaria?That’s not how malaria works. Are you suggesting that they were just releasing malaria mosquitoes? Then why would they draw so much attention to themselves?
Now that we’re finding malaria in that area, shouldn’t we be trying to control the mosquito population and be glad that they have been suppressing it?
What am I missing here?
I’m suggesting that it’s entirely possible that the sterilization process for the mosquitoes they released wasn’t foolproof, and rather than decreasing the population they ended up doing the opposite.
That is fun to think about! How many of the 750 million would need to have mutated enough to become fertile again, to negate the population decreasing effects of the sterile ones, and how likely is it that this happened?
Yeah, that’s a fun question. Probably a lot of variables involved there, how many eggs end up being laid by each female, how many survive, etc. And it’s also possible that this isn’t even caused by any mutation in the sterile population, but some other unintended selection pressure a population of sterile mosquitoes introduced into the environment. One thing with biological systems is that they always surprise us.
So, the males don’t bite humans (so they arent a vector for malaria). If we assume, for arguments sake, that some outrageous number of them (like half of them) actually did end up being fertile, what would the impact of that be? That would still mean that 375 million of the sterile offspring producing mosquitoes were still released. Wouldnt that still be a benefit? Sure, we would have temporarily increased the male mosquito population, but is the availability of males the limiting factor in the ability of female mosquitoes to reproduce? The sterile offspring producing males should have still reduced the total number of female mosquitoes who were able to have fertile children.
You can clearly see my bias here. I think this mosquito experiment was probably a good thing but I’m interested in understanding the mechanism by which you think the release of these mosquitoes may have led to these malaria cases.
Fertility alone may not even be a factor. For example, one thing that could’ve easily happened is that they significantly increased overall mosquito population, and the infertile mosquitoes could’ve been more appealing food for predators than smaller newly hatched mosquitoes. The number of fertile males may not even be a limiting factor because each female lays many eggs. As I said earlier, biological systems are complex and it’s very easy to end up with unintended consequences that are impossible to predict before hand.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts and ideas. I hope progress can be made (with minimal unintended consequence), controlling diseases and disease vectors.
As always, correlation is not causation. Having a plausible hypothesis means nothing without evidence supporting its predictions.
There’s nothing that links the two. The second article even says it’s probably from rising temperatures
Yeah, and covid probably came from a wet market.
If there’s one thing the COVID pandemic taught us, it’s that people are no longer afraid to be dumb in public.
