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You don't have to extinguish all mosquito species. It's enough to only target those which can carry diseases. Ideally one would engineer mosquitos to avoid huma
by est31 6y ago
You don't have to extinguish all mosquito species. It's enough to only target those which can carry diseases. Ideally one would engineer mosquitos to avoid humans because of their smell.
- bamboozled 6y agoMaybe we could also considering modifying ourselves to be less susceptible to mosquitos. Including helping people who live in poverty to have better housing and medicine so their less susceptible to Malaria ?
- jackson1442 6y agoModifying ourselves leads into the messy territory of bodily autonomy and consent. You can see this pretty well in the anti-COVID-vaccine crew. I feel like it'd be much more popular to modify mosquitos than apply some modification to humans. Not to mention the ethical (regarding equity) concerns: disease from mosquitoes affects poverty-stricken areas the most, yet the people with the most access to these bodily modifications or procedures are going to be from wealthy countries.
- jcims 6y agoMosquitoes are a rather distinct element in the natural world and it just seems unlikely that we are capable of understanding the full set of downstream effects of eradicating them entirely.
- bamboozled 6y agoI actually was talking about our behavior, not our actual genetics or biology. My understanding is that a lot of the diseases we want to kill mosquitoes for are also more likely to affect people in developing countries.
- andreareina 6y agoThere are few developed countries in the tropics. Singapore is one, and dengue is a concern here. I understand that the way it's mostly kept under control is through a lot of spraying, which isn't exactly great.
- incompatible 6y agoPerhaps it would be possible to modify mosquitoes so that they don't need blood to reproduce. Other insects manage it somehow.
- grapecookie 6y agoobviously this mutation would not last.
- Turing_Machine 6y agoRight. There are thousands of species of mosquito, most of which don't carry human diseases. Of the ones that do, many of are of African origin -- they evolved there along with us (and the diseases they carry). They are thus essentially invasive species in the rest of the world. The nice thing about potentially using CRISPR-based gene drives to extirpate (e.g.) Aedes aegypti is that it would affect only that species, unlike our current pesticides which tend to kill insects of many different species indiscriminately.