EVOKE THE CULMINATING HARVEST UPON THEIR WING-MEATS:
“You hear that little beating sound?” says Kathleen Parkes, a spokesperson for Verily Life Sciences, a unit of Alphabet. She’s trailing the van in her car, the windows down. “Like a duh-duh-duh? That’s the release of the mosquitoes.”
Jacob Crawford, a Verily senior scientist riding with Parkes, begins describing a mosquito-control technique with dazzling potential. These particular vermin, he explains, were bred in the ultra-high-tech surroundings of Verily’s automated mosquito rearing system, 200 miles away in South San Francisco. They were infected with Wolbachia, a common bacterium. When those 80,000 lab-bred Wolbachia-infected, male mosquitoes mate with their counterpart females in the wild, the result is stealth annihilation: the offspring never hatch. Better make that 79,999. “One just hit the windshield,” says Crawford.
Via Instapundit. This project apparently has caused the mosquito population in Fresno to drop by 95 percent in the targeted areas, with subsequent dancing in the streets (because now the mosquitoes won’t get them). They’re hoping to figure out how to replicate this using less tech-heavy solutions, because if they can do this in areas where the mosquitoes are spreading yellow fever and malaria, well, the sound of their bleached carapaces under our boots will make a most pleasing sound.
Yeah, I really despise these things. Nobody really likes mosquitoes, you understand. They kill humans with nasty diseases that are hard to treat. And even a lot of ecologists are all Well, if you absolutely must genocide a species, go with these miserable [expletive deleted]. Works for me.
“There’s nothing more dangerous than a wounded mosquito” – Roy Spim
The Spanish diminutive “quito” implies the existence of a larger flying bloodsucker, the “mosca” ..
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Mew
You ever been bitten by a horsefly?
I’ve non-voluntarily given blood to biting gnats, mosquitoes, horseflies, and spiders, yes.
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The gaming aspect of a moscamaximo, though … “mosquitoes the size of ravens and almost as smart”
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Mew
Nuke it from orbit: it’s the only way to be sure.
What’s Google got against spiders, anyway? I mean, I hate mosquitos as much as the next person but I don’t think trying to eradicate them is probably a good idea, and you can’t get them back once they’re gone.
I’m .. slightly more concerned about exactly what this Wolbachia will mutate into .. outdoor spiders will still have plenty of other flying pests to feast on, and indoor spiders don’t get all that many mosquitoes .. at least not in properly built and maintained** dwellings.
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Mew
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** the cousin in Florida leaves the door to the pool open, most days, because the pool is inside a screened cage, but has to keep after the kids because they assume this means they can just leave *all the other* doors open ..
A lot of biologists are fairly sure that everything that eats mosquitoes will eat other stuff, and these things are an invasive species in Fresno.
The real problem with killing mosquitos comes from the lack of larvae. 99% of all larvae are eaten by small fish who are in turn eaten by bigger fish. Wiping out mosquitos threatens to create a knock on ripple effect thru the whole ecosystem. I don’t believe they are classified as a keystone species but they might be one anyway. Not to mention they are Primary food source for some species of migratory birds. The question is how many Species are you willing to lose?
The real problem with killing mosquitos comes from the lack of larvae. 99% of all larvae are eaten by small fish who are in turn eaten by bigger fish. Wiping out mosquitos threatens to create a knock on ripple effect thru the whole ecosystem. I don’t believe they are classified as a keystone species but they might be one anyway. Not to mention they are Primary food source for some species of migratory birds. The question is how many Species are you willing to lose?
Those fools! Don’t they know that the only thing that stops the Galactic Federation from destroying our planet whenever another product of galactic mad bioscience escapes here is a specific endangered species – namely, the MOSQUITO!?