I’m a little dumb. Can you help me explain what’s going on here?
They released a bunch of genetically modified mosquitoes, that sabotage reproduction and decrease the mosquito population.
About 3 years later, malaria was found in the same area as the decreased mosquito population.
Are you suggesting that they genetically modified the mosquitoes to have malaria?That’s not how malaria works. Are you suggesting that they were just releasing malaria mosquitoes? Then why would they draw so much attention to themselves?
Now that we’re finding malaria in that area, shouldn’t we be trying to control the mosquito population and be glad that they have been suppressing it?
What am I missing here?
I’m suggesting that it’s entirely possible that the sterilization process for the mosquitoes they released wasn’t foolproof, and rather than decreasing the population they ended up doing the opposite.
That is fun to think about! How many of the 750 million would need to have mutated enough to become fertile again, to negate the population decreasing effects of the sterile ones, and how likely is it that this happened?
Yeah, that’s a fun question. Probably a lot of variables involved there, how many eggs end up being laid by each female, how many survive, etc. And it’s also possible that this isn’t even caused by any mutation in the sterile population, but some other unintended selection pressure a population of sterile mosquitoes introduced into the environment. One thing with biological systems is that they always surprise us.
