Millions of Mosquitoes Released in Hawaii To Save Rare Bird From Extinction (theguardian.com) 36
Millions of mosquitoes are being released from helicopters in Hawaii in a last-ditch attempt to save rare birds slipping into extinction. From a report: The archipelago's endemic, brightly coloured honeycreeper birds are dying of malaria carried by mosquitoes first introduced by European and American ships in the 1800s. Having evolved with no immunity to the disease, the birds can die after just a single bite. Thirty-three species of honeycreeper have become extinct and many of the 17 that remain are highly endangered, with concerns some could be extinct within a year if no action is taken. Now conservationists are urgently trying to save them with an unusual strategy: releasing more mosquitoes.
Every week a helicopter drops 250,000 male mosquitoes with a naturally occurring bacterium that acts as birth control on to the islands of the remote archipelago. Already, 10 million have been released. "The only thing that's more tragic is if [the birds] went extinct and we didn't try. You can't not try," said Chris Warren, the forest bird programme coordinator for Haleakala national park on the island of Maui. The population of one honeycreeper, the Kaua'i creeper, or 'akikiki, has dropped from 450 in 2018 to five in 2023, with just one single bird known to be left in the wild on Kaua'i island, according to the national park service.
Every week a helicopter drops 250,000 male mosquitoes with a naturally occurring bacterium that acts as birth control on to the islands of the remote archipelago. Already, 10 million have been released. "The only thing that's more tragic is if [the birds] went extinct and we didn't try. You can't not try," said Chris Warren, the forest bird programme coordinator for Haleakala national park on the island of Maui. The population of one honeycreeper, the Kaua'i creeper, or 'akikiki, has dropped from 450 in 2018 to five in 2023, with just one single bird known to be left in the wild on Kaua'i island, according to the national park service.
Gene editing (Score:1)
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Didn't we really only start to sort out malaria prevention reliably in humans recently? I think that's been a tough one to solve and it's made more sense to attack the vector itself in this case.
I also support the concept of gene driving mosquitoes to extinctrion as a class of animal. [scientificamerican.com]
Humans through our sheer expansion have extincted thousands of species at this point? And right here in this story, this is a problem we created so it;s ours to solve (it's also ours to define, nature does not "care" about th
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we get to try doing a few extinctions on purpose rather than willful ignorance. Fuck them mosquitoes.
No mosquitoes are native to Hawaii.
They are all invasive species.
Wiping them out in the Hawai'ian Islands will not cause any extinctions since they are still thriving in the native range.
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I was thinking about the concept in general and applying it en-masse and extincting at least the most disease carrying genera like Anopheles
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While we're at it, ticks can get fucked too.
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Easier? We know how to make sterile male mosquitoes. We aren't very good at editing specific genes for rare birds
Re: Gene editing (Score:2)
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Thanks for re-enforcing my point. Go look at how the California condor has made somewhat of a recovery. If people just took a picture or two in their native habitat, they'd be extinct now. In 1987, all of the wild condors were captured and placed in captivity at the LA and San Diego zoos. Because of zoos and conservation efforts, they've gone from 27 in the world, again all captive, to over 550 in the wild. They're still on the seriously endangered species list, but there's far more than there would be had
What could go wrong? (Score:3, Insightful)
I know an old lady who swallowed a fly...
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Releasing sterile mosquitoes as a form of control has been done since the late 1980s and there have been no significant repercussions.
Try again when you have actual data instead of just waving your hands wildly in the hopes that someone will mistake it for you having any clue whatsoever about this topic.
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I invite you to go back and read my post, and then look at how much you read into it. :)
Wild hand waving... Project much?
Re:What could go wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
>"What could go wrong?"
If I had a magic button that would make all mosquitos on earth disappear forever, I would press it. No single creature has caused more misery, death, sickness, and pain for humans and non-human animals, alike. And they contribute almost nothing to the food chain. I would press it for fleas, ticks, bed-bugs, and chiggers, as well, for the same reasons, and probably stop there.
As for what could go wrong when it isn't a magic button- well, I suppose the worst outcome would be if that "naturally occurring bacterium" somehow becomes a negative cross-species vector, but that is highly unlikely. More likely would be the mosquitos adapt to it, in which case things were no worse than before.
A lot can go wrong (Score:3)
As for what could go wrong when it isn't a magic button- well, I suppose the worst outcome would be....
The worst outcome could be a lot worse than that. We do not know for certain whether the editted genes could spill from mosquitoes into other species and, if some of those other species are critical parts of the food chain we could end up eradicating far more than just mostquitoes. I'd suggest we learn a lot more about this sort of approach first and then, once we are really confident, try it in a non-lethal trivial way e.g. edit the genes to prevent the spread of malaria instead of kill the species or eve
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>"The worst outcome could be a lot worse than that. We do not know for certain whether the editted genes could spill from mosquitoes into other species and, if some of those other species are critical parts of the food chain we could end up eradicating far more than just mostquitoes."
Well, that is kinda what I said with: ''' if that "naturally occurring bacterium" somehow becomes a negative cross-species vector'''. Note also my quotation marks- the bacterium *was* naturally-occurring, until we tampered
Re:A lot can go wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
DNA doesn't "spill" into other species. DNA is not contagious. We shed DNA all the time, non stop, all around us. All animals do, and yet no one is picking up dog DNA into their genomes. So this is a non-issue; DNA just doesn't work this way.
There is no risk to the food chain. There is some concern about Gene Modification, or GMO, where you're mixing genes from different species. Most of the hype around GMO is nonsense, but there is a legitimate concern about how GMO affects microbiomes in creatures. But gene editing doesn't do that, and as a result gene editing is not considered GMO when it comes to agricultural products per the USDA and several other agencies. In essence you're only removing a part of the genome and allowing the cell to repair it naturally with a different function the cell would normally repair; as a result the DNA is staying within how the creature or plant would evolve naturally. The USDA considers gene editing to just a shortcut with the same result as selective breeding, which in essence is gene "selection" that we've been doing since the invention of agriculture.
"Try it in a non-lethal trivial way e.g. edit the genes to prevent the spread of malaria": you don't know what you're asking. Reproductive processes are much more readily understood. But we know literally nothing about the complex multitude of genes in the mosquito genome that would prevent it from picking up a bacteria like malaria. Hell, it's not even the genes that do that; it's just mosquitoes eating blood and picking up the bacteria in the process; genes don't play into this. It's far more understood how to interrupt the disease life cycle by taking out a known part of the chain.
"Or edit them in a way that has no effect but is easy to detect" - this scientifically doesn't exist. The concept of junk DNA is long gone; we now know that all DNA does something. And nothing is "easy to detect". Case in point: we couldn't control the spread of COVID because the best tool we had was PCR which was invented in 1982; how are we going to document the spread of an edited genome across a species of mosquito in an uncontrolled environment?
All of your ideas make logical sense, but people have been studying this exact problem for decades. They're taking these approaches because they have found that this is actually the better approach, and/or an actual feasible approach.
Mosquitoes helped Africa (Score:2)
I hate mosquitoes but never say they never did anything good.
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I would press that button also for kissing bugs [healthline.com]. They crawl on your face at night while you sleep, bite your lips to feed, excrete into your mouth, give you a fatal disease.
Also, Scabies [wikipedia.org] has got to go. The itch this parasite causes is unbearable!
May as well push it for Naegleria fowleri [wikipedia.org], a little amoeba that crawls up your nose, into your brain, and eats your brain cells until you die.
Lets see, there is that skin-eating bacteria that we recently read was breaking out in Japan. *click*.
Oh and yellow jacke
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It would be tempting to press the magic button for more and more things until disaster happens. So I was trying to keep the list short. Not that familiar with kissing bugs (or how wide-spread they are).
Yellow jackets, for example, probably are a significant part of certain food chains, participate in pollenation, prey on pest insects, and really are not that annoying or dangerous.
Now, something like viruses.... hmm. We wouldn't exist without them. They did provide extreme evolutionary pressure, and did
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Alternate coverage (Score:2)
and can we get some dino dna at the same time? (Score:2)
and can we get some dino dna at the same time?
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and can we get some dino dna at the same time?
Non-avian dinosaurs never lived in Hawaii.
The oldest Hawaiian island is Kure, which is 28 million years old, 40 million years after Chicxulub.
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Non-avian dinosaurs never lived in Hawaii.
Can't you say that of anywhere given that technically all dinosaurs are avian i.e. related to birds?
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Second of all, what the fuck are you talking about someone "let" Lahaina burn? It was dry as hell in late summer, temperatures were over 90 degrees and there were literally sustained hurricane strength winds driving the flames. Nothing was going to stop that.
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
Let Lahaina burn, but now save the little birds. Order of priorities just feels wrong here.
This is like saying all animal shelters should be shut down because there are people starving in Africa. No one is obligated to devote their resources to a cause someone else has deemed a higher priority than the one they care about.
Is there anything "Native" in Hawaii? (Score:3, Insightful)
At one time, the islands didn't exist until volcanoes erupted and made "land" in the middle of the ocean. At that time, it was just lava. No plants or animals.
Are there any "real" native species on islands created by an "Earth zit"?
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At one time
At one time the earth didn't exist. Is anything anywhere native? What even is the process of evolution and does it even work over the 28million year timespan the islands we now call Hawaii have existed? /s