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.
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.