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This is amazing. Far better than killing them off.
Shouldn’t you include /s tag here
Not a biologist, but it actually is better on paper. They can still pierce other animals. Just not humans. They stay part of the food chain for amphibians and birds or what not, we don’t get malaria. Seems like a win-win.
LOL FUCK EM
“Sheen, this is the 7th week in a row you’ve shown CRISPR modifications to the mosquito genome to curb malaria in class”
Comments are all the same as when they made mosquitos infertile, unable to spread malaria or wingless too.
Why not just eradicate them? Genuine question. I don’t think they serve any purpose in nature and are just pissing off every living being.
Eradication is really hard. If you just kill mosquitoes in a certain area, what’s gonna stop them from coming back? You’re just not gonna get all of them.
This way you introduce a mutation that can actually propagate through the gene pool, disabling the undesired trait for future generations. It’s also highly selective, so that you don’t accidentally get rid of other species or poison an area with pesticides.
Also living beings have no “purpose”. They fill an evolutionary niche and shape the ecological system around them. The piss off us, so we play a little god, but nature has no opinions or morals whatsoever.
They need blood to procreate so the method in the post does exactly what you are asking for
Many species of mosquitos are reliant on blood for reproduction. The females utilize a “blood meal” for the nutrients for laying eggs to be fertilized. Additionally, it is the female mosquito bite that transmits diseases like malaria.
Bats eat mosquitoes so we be killing off bats food supply. So just get bats and solve your mosquitoe problem.
They absolutely serve purpose in nature, they are a significant food source for bats and many other insects and males are pollinators.
Putting aside questions of ecosystems etc, I think the main reason is that we just can’t - ironic since we seem to be extint-ing all the other animals
In South America they tried in the 50s and 60s, and more kept cropping up. They breed so quickly, if you miss an area they can just rebound. Then more can come in on ships and stuff
So you couldn’t really localise it, it would have to be a huge global undertaking. And it would likely require widespread use of pesticides that are at best tricksy and at worst illegal, not to mention environmentally shitty
Most modern plans for eradication involve creating a virus that handles it, rather than a pesticide.
Have the virus introduce a gene that takes a few generations of breeding in the impacted population before it starts to debilitate or sterilize the mosquitoes. That way your virus can start to kill the population even as it spreads to areas that were missed.Also significant politics within the field preventing integrated approaches to control. It’s possible we could target specific species of mosquito that are vectors for deadly disease, with the intent of eradicating the disease by suppressing the vector. It would be the greatest collective undertaking of human kind. We’d have to shelf things like international borders and profits.
We’re stuck with being annoyed in any case.
Well, they actually do have their ecological roles and it is always a hard decision if one should interfere on such a large scale with biological systems. We might think that we understand it, but it could be totally wrong. Really hard to predict. Mosquitoes are an important food source for other animals and are also pollinators.
I read somewhere that spiders & co. don’t like them because they have too less nutritional value. Literally flying little bots that want to stab you.
I can’t believe i’m saying this, but… I think mosquitos don’t deserve this. There’s basically no life form that deserves our cruelty more than mosquitoes, but this pushes a boundary i didn’t know was there.
One day we will be Gods
Is this Drake of the 69 Dragons?
It’s only 3 years older: Bob Page from Deus Ex’s intro cinematic.
This will probably work for 20 years, due to evolution they’ll just re-evolve that thing hard
If your proboscis stays engorged for more than 4 hours, contact a geneticist
We gave a mosquito gender dysphoria?
We have created tomboy mosquito. Humanity has peaked.
Ok but mosquitoes historically are the #1 killers of humans, by an order of magnitude. This could be argued as a form of evolution. We simply engineered them out as a threat. GG get gud scrub, see you in 3 million years when you have your own AI generated bioengineering.
Ok but mosquitoes historically are the #1 killers of humans, by an order of magnitude
Homo sapien: am I a joke to you?
According to google, yeah. Mosquito-borne diseases are responsible for 52 billion deaths. I was extremely surprised myself.
I’m pretty sure over history mosquitoes have killed far more people than people have.
Probably. But it’s also a bit of a difficult question to compare the two.
One prominent estimate is that about half of all humans who have ever lived died from mosquito-related illness, about 50 billion of the 100 billion humans who have ever lived.
For humans, it’s estimated that about 3-4% of paleolithic humans died from violence at the hands of another person, and that number may have risen to about 12% during medieval history, before plummetting in the modern age.
But that’s the comparison of direct violence versus illness. Humans have a strong capacity to indirectly cause death, including by starvation, illness, indirect trauma. How do we count deaths from being intentionally starved as part of a siege? Or biological weapons, including the time the Nazis intentionally flooded Italian marshes to increase malaria? Do we double count those as both human and mosquito deaths?
And then there’s unintentional deaths, caused by indifference or recklessness or negligence. Humans have caused famines, floods, fires, etc.
So yeah, mosquitoes probably win. But don’t sleep on humans. And remember that the count is still going on, and humans can theoretically take the lead in the future.
We have suffered for millions of years under mosquitos are they are likely the biggest killer of humans in history. Maybe us evolving big brains and developing genetic engineering is an evolutionary necessity?
Or as Harbinger said: “We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it.”
Is that mass effect?
Yep :)
Drew Karpyshyn really knocked that conversation out of the park. One of the very best scenes in gaming history.
See, that is why you’d want actual authors to do your game’s story for you…
In pretty much every other context, yeah. But for real, fuck mosquitoes.
Yeah but those little bastards started it. People call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide but that’s nothing compared with the mozzie kill count.
I am a hippy nature person who tries to be merciful and kind to plants or insects. The exceptions are mosquitoes and ticks. Those fuckers want to take my blood and dont settle for one serving if they get the chance. Were in a biological armrace and so far we’ve been loosing. Let’s see how they like being fucked with.
Also ticks.
I would take 100 mosquito bites over one tick. One of the only creatures in nature to scare the hell out of me. And I own snakes.
Ahh, someone else who views the risks correctly. Spent a lot of time in the swamps in Alabama. Wore snake gaiters for the giant cotton mouths. Soaked my clothes in permethrin. Still way more scared of the ticks than the snakes. Especially that Alphagal stuff.
Do vegans support this because it prevents mosquitoes from consuming animal flesh, or do they oppose it because it denies the mosquitoes their nature?
ebin pwn
It’s nuanced because it could reduce suffering overall, but it could also disrupt ecosystems in ways we can’t predict and cause even more suffering. I think the latter is more likely. People have a tendency to paint animals they don’t like as insignificant to the ecosystem, but they’re nearly always incorrect. Wasps, for instance, are important pollinators, even if they do sting, and mosquitoes are an important food source, even if they are deadly. Anyone who advocates for eradicating species like these is doing so through a biased lens. We are nowhere near the point, technologically or scientifically, that we’d be safe playing god with the natural world like this – especially not with the massive damage we’ve already caused to the environment. Someday? Maybe. But not right now.
I do also find it horrific to forcibly alter a mosquito’s body so she can’t express her natural behaviors. After all – mosquitoes may cause harm, but they lack the capacity for moral reasoning, and thus cannot be evil. Thus, they don’t “deserve” any kind of torment. But my personal discomfort with this isn’t a moral argument.
So, uh, that’s my take on it as a vegan.
I’d argue that we can predict ecosystem effects. In America we annihilated malaria hot spots with DDT. Didn’t seem to crash any ecosystems.
Didn’t seem to doesn’t necessarily mean it didn’t happen, it can be difficult to quantify. Most people don’t notice a lot of the constant large scale ecological devastation that does happen.
The real concern is that even if it was fine in one location, that can’t reliably be assumed to be the case for other ecosystems. This issue is really complicated, we’ve acted hastily in the past and done some insane lasting damage so I’d say it’s best to be careful.
All that said, even if I’m vegan and this whole thing makes me extremely uncomfortable, working to eradicate malaria is objectively good.
Though it didn’t “crash” any ecosystems, DDT still accumulates in the environment, where it remains for a long time and causes ongoing harm to insects and the animals that prey on them. Though the most problematic use of DDT by far is in agriculture, its use against mosquitoes isn’t exactly without issue. Not to mention, mosquito populations can become resistant to DDT, requiring more of it to achieve the same effect.
The whole point is that DDT caused a mosquito crash and nothing bad happened. If we can crash mosquitoes without DDT, it would be better for everyone.
I wouldn’t say that nothing bad happened. America – particularly urban areas where anti-mosquito measures have been implemented – has been dealing with declines of important populations of birds and insects, and we don’t fully understand the exact causes. Which is to say, we don’t know what role mosquito population reduction has played in this. We have vaccines against mosquito-borne illnesseses, which I believe are preferable to eradicating a species and the potentially devastating consequences we could encounter.
I would argue that habitat destruction, the introduction of hypercarivores, and chemical spraying would have a much larger effect on bird and insect populations around urban areas than a reduction in mosquitoes, but I’ll admit that I haven’t done any research (primary or secondary) on the topic.
My point was that a genetic attack vector would have far less side-effects than DDT, and pointing out the flaws of DDT does nothing to criticize attacking mosquitoes genetically.
That’s true. Criticizing DDT was off-track.
lol its soon gonna be us. and you bet they will be selling it as a great thing at first.
Facebook is leaking. Yuck.🤢
why?
CRISPR is profoundly difficult and expensive, and gets more difficult and expensive the more chromosomes are at play. Modifying mosquitos is much easier, and with the short generations (days or weeks instead of decades for humans) it’s much easier to get the genetic changes to stick and observe their efficacy. We might get around to modifying humans someday, but it will likely be centuries before it is available for anything besides fixing lethal anomalies (and even then, it’ll be a long time until that becomes consistently successful).
i have the impression we could be there in several decades, not centuries?
As a widely available, cost-effective treatment? Almost certainly not. We have yet to successfully genetically modify a human being and there’s a metric ton of legal and ethical red tape to deal with before we can even try.
red tape doesnt take centuries to cut
Not necessarily, but the advancement of the technology and refinement of the technique are not progressing very quickly and since it’s so far away from human application, there’s not a lot of money/investment in it.
