from Hacker News

We’re trying to stop bad mosquitoes by raising and releasing good ones

by typage on 10/6/16, 11:41 PM with 64 comments

• by AceJohnny2 on 10/7/16, 4:30 AM

  *Verily Debug Project (title is currently "Google Debug Project")

  Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences before the Alphabet split-up) is a sister company to Google. This isn't Google, and it's not code, but a project to help eliminate mosquitoes by a bioscience company.

• by ThePhysicist on 10/7/16, 7:26 AM

  I wonder how long it will take for the mosquitoes to evolve a mechanism that allows the female to detect males infected with that bacterium and not mate with them, or a mechanism to counteract the detrimental effect on the development of the eggs.

  Right now the evolutionary pressure to do this is probably quite low as there is only a small number of infected males, but if that number goes up the pressure will increase exponentially.

  Example:

  If 1 % of males are currently infected with the bacteria, the selective advantage of a mosquito that can counteract the infection is just 1.0/0.99 (as the probability of mating with an infected male is just 1 percent), which is probably too small compared to other risks to produce any visible evolutionary effects.

  If we increase the number of infected males to 90 %, the evolutionary advantage of detecting them soars to 1.0/0.1 = 10! This means a mosquito able to detect or counteract an infection is ten times as likely to produce offspring, which provides an incredibly strong gradient for evolution.

  The question is of course how fast an immunity can arise (or if it already exists in the population), and how many generations of mosquitoes are able to survive after the infected males are introduced.

  Probably they ran their own population genetics simulations on this, so I'd be curious to see results, which should give a good indication on whether this can work and if so under which conditions.

  My personal guess is that it won't be effective, as there are very few cases where introducing a single external stress factor into a population causes it to collapse entirely, what's more likely is that it will adapt and relapse.

• by matt4077 on 10/7/16, 6:00 AM

  I still want to build:

  - An array of three microphones for locating mosquitos by sound

  - a servo-mounted laser

  - Software to combine the two, possibly with a manual mode.

• by repsilat on 10/7/16, 4:51 AM

  How is "Can't breed" a good thing? Something to do with

  > good bugs ... will stop bad ones from reproducing

  ? Are mosquitos monogamous (or do they just get really tired after sex, or do they transmit the infection to others...) If "good bugs" don't bite, I'd have thought you'd want them to reproduce as much as possible, so long as not-biting was hereditary. A non-reproducing population can never out-compete the reproducing rest of the species.

• by hubert123 on 10/7/16, 9:43 AM

  I dont get it, if you release a ton of sterile male mosquitos.. what exactly is their purpose? They cant bite, breed or spread diseases.. well okay, but why would the amount of bad mosquitos decrease in any way from their introduction? Wouldnt they simply die out quickly then, what's the lifespan of these good mosquitos? I dont get it at all.

• by piyush_soni on 10/7/16, 11:07 AM

  Seriously, Google (/Alphabet), as long as you continue to invest in such research studies, you can take all of my so called personal data for its progress and I won't mind.

• by doesnotexist on 10/7/16, 4:34 AM

  Will we eventually see resistance to the bacteria the way that bacteria evolve to be resistant to antibiotics?

• by mattparlane on 10/7/16, 12:46 PM

  They don't mention this, but I believe this can cause extinction of mosquitoes within an area:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique

• by robbrown451 on 10/7/16, 6:24 AM

  This seems like the only way it can work is to completely overwhelm the population with these sterile males, which seems prohibitively expensive.

  I'm also a fan of the idea of the idea of locating them with sensors and shooting them out of the air with a cheap laser. It seems like this sort of technology should get very inexpensive pretty soon.

• by corecoder on 10/7/16, 9:39 AM

  I first read about using sterile male mosquitoes more than twenty years ago (there was no mention of the bacteria, so I don't know if a different technique was proposed); how comes this is news now?

  Or is it that this has been proposed since forever but only now someone is talking of actually throwing money at it?

  Edit: typos

• by smnscu on 10/7/16, 12:01 PM

  Similar (using crispr to change the mosquitoes' genome) video from Kurzgesagt, one of my favourite Youtube channels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnzcwTyr6cE

• by blablabla123 on 10/8/16, 5:15 AM

  Wow, do people ever learn from history? I mean you just have to visit Australia to see what happens when you mess with nature...

• by fiatjaf on 10/7/16, 12:01 PM

  What's going to happen: a bug in development will cause the "good" mosquitoes' eggs to actually hatch, giving birth to mosquitoes that, because of an unexpected consequence of the bug, are immune to all other forms of killing AND live longer AND can give birth to many more mosquitoes than the previous, normal, "bad" mosquito.

• by interdrift on 10/7/16, 10:11 AM

  Develop this on GitHub. It will have huge public impact and will pick up steam fast!

• by govindpatel on 10/7/16, 7:13 AM

  Well, How will they know that all the bad bugs are gone?

• by computerwizard on 10/7/16, 4:43 AM

  I'm sure this will end well..

• by _pmf_ on 10/7/16, 11:31 AM

  Releasing a species to control another species; what could possibly go wrong?

• by partycoder on 10/7/16, 6:41 AM

  The problem I see is that, while this can be used for good, it can also be weaponized.

  Zika for example, has existed for thousands of years if not millions of years. How come just in 2015 there's this massive unprecedented outbreak? Just when Oxitec starts releasing their "good mosquitoes"?

  What specifically changed and caused this outbreak?