The US is/was recently saying that, since the a. egyptii is not native to, and cannot live in MOST of the US, we don’t need to worry about Zika.
What is someone with Zika arrives in CA and is bitten by a local, indigenous mosquito?
How many times, with how many victims, would it take to spread the virus via the native mosquito?
If this is even remotely possible, the problem is much greater than just using GM to suppress a. egyptii for a few years.
Yes, I AM thinking of the Olympics scheduled for Rio.
In reading this thread, and Wildbill’s from long ago, I suddenly realized that a big section of folklore is really true after all. Bats really do drink our blood! :eek: True, they get it delivered in tiny buzzing bottles, but bats drink our blood, and lots of it. Mosquitos and bats are vampires.
I believe that was mostly a supply-and-demand/price issue. With the big decrease in DDT use in the USA, the manufacturers cut back on their production, and the price went up. Which made it harder for poor 3rd-world countries to buy DDT.
Just want to add, thankyou for this thread, and the considered replies. As much as I hate mozzies, I’m very grateful for reasons to not annihilate them at my earliest convenience.
That being said, FUCK the media for scaring the pants off’ve people who now think that every mozzie is a vector for microcephaly and that your brain will shrink if you get bitten.
Yeah, I bear no love at all for mosquitoes, having grown up on the upper Texas Gulf Coast, but the fearmongering associated with this Zika business is well past absurd.
The basic fact is that unless you’re a pregnant woman, getting the Zika virus isn’t liable to kill you or cause you any long-term damage. West Nile is a much bigger threat overall in the US. I suppose it’s a good thing that the preventative measures for Zika, which people are super-freaked out about right now are the exact same ones for West Nile, which actually killed quite a few people in the US over the past several years, including the husband of a Doper, IIRC.
Pollinator insects that also occasionally extract albumin from large mammals, which is exploited by their predators?
Necessary, strictly speaking? Maybe, maybe not.
Difficult to compensate for if lost? Most likely.
You do not have a human right not to be bitten by insects.
The mosquitoes are not particular which animal they bite. However, is the Zika virus particular to humans? Are we it’s target host?
Perhaps a better strategy is to work on eliminating the problem diseases like malaria, dengue, and zika, and not just their hosts. ISTM we want to target the bug we can see, but a better strategy would be to target the germs we cannot readily see. Spreading poison and draining swamps to rid an area of a disease-carrying bugs seems more destructive than need be.
And I agree on the media irresponsibility. Zika is this year’s Ebola.
One ignorance-fighting question here: do female mosquitoes bite and feed only once and then are able to lay eggs and procreate? Or, do they bite several times (and maybe several animals/people) and thereby pick-up whatever is in their blood?
There is no way mosquitoes aren’t somehow tied into the ecosystem in a very complex way. They are eaten as eggs, larvae and adults by the gazillions. Somebody is going to starve!
I know there’s media hype but Brazil did go from 150 cases of microcephaly in one year to 4000 the next, and it’s not even spread across the whole country yet. But yeah, you’ll only get achy from it personally.
There have been big successful eradication campaigns in the past so istm that we shouldn’t have to purely theorize about this so much. Is there no data on what happened to the ecosystem back then?
My creds - I work on GM mosquitoes (18 years experience) and mosquito-borne pathogens (12 years experience), and am getting ready to make the big jump into Zika. Would have before now, but until a few months ago no one really cared about Zika. If there wasn’t a potential link to newborn microcephaly no one would care about it now.
Eradication has been tried before. Its is very difficult. The GM mosquito technique currently being used is the RIDL strategy. Here’s a post of mine from about a year ago on the details of this:
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Thanks for posting this! Cleared up so many questions that I’ve had.
Do you run or blog or anything? Your job sounds pretty cool even though I am opposed to the practice of messing with nature, still fascinating stuff.
Holy hell man, are you insane? Do you have any idea how annoying just two or three vegans can be? Now you want to weaponize them into mosquito form? Talk about the law of unintended consequences!
Then they can continue their role as food animals for many species, but without bothering humans or other animals or making us sick? No more malaria, Zika, dangue, West Nile, etc?[/QUOTE]
That being said, there might be a kernel of wisdom in this. In Aedes aegypti (and ONLY in Aedes aegypti - this doesn’t apply to other mosquito species) there is a gene called “Aedes head peptide” which is a protein hormone turned on in the mosquito brain after taking a blood meal. When it is expressed, it turns off host-seeking behavior and the mosquito doesn’t feed anymore.
Other mosquitoes presumably have similar head peptide genes, but they are so different at the sequence level we have not been able to pull them out of the genomes. Aedes head peptide was isolated old-school in the 1980’s - fractionating mosquito head extracts and injecting them one by one into mosquitoes to see what they did.
There are also mosquitoes that can lay a batch of eggs without taking a bloodmeal. This is called “autogeny”. In this case, the mosquitoes store up lots of nutrients as larvae and use them for eggs when they are adults. Problem is it only happens once - after laying the first egg batch they need a bloodmeal for the subsequent ones.
Autogeny is a complex trait involving lots of things we don’t fully understand. Aedes aegypti is not widely autogenous (i.e. they generally need blood for eggs), but the trait has been found at low frequencies in some studies.
So what we would have to do is engineer Aedes to express head peptide constitutively in their brains to turn off bloodfeeding, while at the same time engineering them to be autogenous. They would lay a single batch of eggs and never feed again. This would have a big fitness cost (as they would have less offspring than wild-type) so we’d have to link the whole thing to a gene drive (probably based on CRISPR/Cas9) to push it into the population.
Easy-peasy. Give me about 20-40 million dollars and 10 years and I think we could do it!
I don’t know. Is it you/you family at risk or anonymous brown people “over there”?
Its a serious question. IME the people who rail against tech like GM mosquitoes (or DDT etc…) tend to live in comfortable, rich western countries. Arguments against using them often devolve into “there are too many people in the world anyway” - again, its OK when its poor anonymous brown people doing the dying.
People in affected areas usually are big supporters of the technology. If there is a huge Zika-induced microcephaly outbreak in the States I fully expect massive calls to deploy anything and everything that might help, ecology be damned.
On edit, I don’t mean to sidetrack the thread but this is an issue that really grates me.
I want to thank you, mozchron, for your excellent and informative posts on the zika outbreak and mosquitoes. Your posts on the board here have been authoritative, easy for this non-scientist to understand, and the kind of information that makes this place so great.
I nominate you for this month’s unofficial SDMB Ignorance Fighting Warrior award!
