3 ms·

My first reaction was, "Gee, what could possibly go wrong?". Eep. But apparently there is some good science behind this?

• legohead 12y ago
  I thought it was going to be a breed of mosquito that couldn't/wouldn't bite humans. doh...
  • ufo 12y ago
    Female mosquitoes must feed on blood to be able to reproduce so engineering a bite-free mosquito is impossible.
    • derekp7 12y ago
      But you could in theory have a mosquito that is repelled by humans, and only feeds on birds.
      • ufo 12y ago
        That trait is going to end up being selected against very quickly. Humans are much more plentiful.
        • digisth 12y ago
          More plentiful than what? There are an estimated 200-400 billion birds in the world, with 10-20 billion in (for example) the US alone. Or did you mean something else? How many birds: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/03/how-many-birds http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/03/how-many-birds
          • ufo 12y ago
            I'm talking about cities. The dengue fever mosquito is an urban plague.
      • pvaldes 12y ago
        You don't need to create such thing. First because is a bad idea. You are diverting more energy from birds to insects. You will end with less birds (new diseases, blood parasites, etc in the equation) and... ¿more mosquito than before?. The fact is that there are a lot of extant mosquito species that do exactly that and they are here since millions of years. They did not have displaced the other mosquitoes and they didn't fix the problem with malaria.