| TL;DR > Donaldson was in a hurry, so she says she signed their clipboard and watched as they hung a small, black mosquito capture cup from a tree in her yard. > “I don’t even know what I signed. I just signed my name,” she said. “I was like ‘Oh, mosquito control, yeah whatever.'” > Oxitec says the mosquitoes, all males — which don’t bite humans — will then breed with wild females, which do bite. But they’ll pass on the OX5034 gene, a hereditary payload that prevents any female offspring from reaching adulthood. The theory is that the more the gene-hacked mosquitoes and their descendants reproduce, the fewer biting female mosquitoes there will be in the area. > This real-world experiment, which is scheduled to begin imminently, will target the mosquito species Aedes aegypti. These bugs only make up two to four percent of the mosquito population in the Florida Keys, but they’re associated with nearly all cases of mosquito-borne illnesses. Oxitec says the trial could help stop the spread of insect-borne diseases that affect humans, like dengue and Zika, by preventing the bugs that carry them from surviving. > The mosquitoes released [...] carry two copies of the gene, but because they’re mating with females in the wild, their offspring only get one. That means fewer and fewer will carry the OX5034 trait until it gets filtered out of the wild altogether. Unless what I'm reading are outright lies, I would welcome this if I lived in the area. |