Swarms of Mosquitoes have been Released in Florida, the US and It is a Good Thing

Midsummers and monsoon settings in a month are an ideal breeding time for the mosquitoes. That’s right; those pesky little hummers are back with a bang. 100 bucks say you have already been bitten by one. Boy, do we hate the tiny creatures. Well, they don’t give us much reason not to. Female mosquitoes are responsible for spreading nasty diseases like malaria, dengue, yellow fever, filarial elephantiasis, zika among many others, not to mention scratchy red bumps on the skin. But in their defense, the females are just trying to survive (aren’t we all?) because they need human blood for subsistence. The blood-suckers want to survive long enough to procreate and propagate their genes; you can’t hold it against them. But the fact that they happen to be carriers of disease–causing pathogens and while feeding on us, pass those on to us is a bummer. They are what is termed in biology a ‘vector’.

A vector is characterized as an organism carrying disease-causing pathogens which transfers the pathogens to another organism while being unaffected itself. There are three genera of mosquitoes infamous for their infectious bite- Anopheles, Aegis, and Culex. An interesting fact that many of you might not know is that it is only the female mosquitoes that bite humans, males feed on nectar and the like for nutrition. This makes the females villains, right? Not for long. Scientists have come up with an ingenious solution for our mosquito problem.

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A few days ago, a biotech firm Oxitec, backed by Bill Gates, released male mosquitoes in the Florida Keys, a group of islands south of Florida. While this may sound a bit counterproductive, these are no ordinary mosquitoes, but have been bio-engineered to carry out a brilliant plan. The genetically modified  (GM) males named OX5034 when mate with wild females produce progeny bequeathed death and doom by their father. The female larvae die before reaching maturity, meaning before they can bite us or mate with a male. The male offspring get to live, but only to pass on the lethal gene to the wild females they mate with. And the cycle continues. In the long run, the folks at Oxitec expect the mosquito population to decline, effectively bringing the spread of diseases to a halt. This experiment is targeted at the Aedes aegypti population which makes up to 4% of the total mosquito population in the Keys but causes the majority of diseases such as zika, dengue, chikungunya, and yellow fever.

This marks the first time the genetically modified  (GM) mosquitoes have been released in the US.

The experiment has been previously carried out in Brazil, Malaysia, Cayman Islands, and Panama albeit on a small scale. The process in the US involves placing boxes in six locations in three areas of Monroe County namely Cudjoe Key, Ramrod Key, and Vaca Key. Seated in the boxes are OX5034 male eggs, which will transform into adults and fly off in the coming weeks. 12,000 males are expected to mature and release into the environment each week over the next 12 weeks. Oxitec will later capture the mosquitoes to assess them on parameters such as how far they travel from the box, how long they survive in the population, and if the mutation is successfully able to kill the female larvae. To make identification easier, the bio-engineered mosquitoes have a fluorescent marker in their genes which makes them glow under a certain type of red light. The goal is to release 20 million mosquitoes over two years, as well as carry out a similar experiment in Texas.

I am sure you might be thinking that we already have a solution for the mosquitoes, it is called an insecticide. Insecticides kill mosquitoes whether male or female without requiring elaborate procedures- you just have to spray them.  But there is a thing called evolution that messes up our good old insecticide solution; repeated insecticide use has led to resistance in mosquitoes. So now the mosquitoes couldn’t care less about the insecticides in our arsenal.

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No story is good without setbacks, am I right? Just ask Bollywood. it turns out that the mosquito experiment had been stalled for a decade before finally gaining acceptance this year. The reason you ask? The trite ‘man is not meant to meddle’ philosophy-people were concerned about the effects the release of OX5034 mosquitoes will have on humans, other animals, and the ecosystem. In the same vein, if the female offspring reached maturity and mated with the males, it could lead to the birth of hybrid mosquitoes. The locals were apprehensive regarding the credibility of the science involved in the experiment and also for making their area a testing site- they were essentially the guinea pigs. I would like to point out that the firm has till now released billions of GM mosquitoes in the wild during their test runs and has not encountered any problem till now. Still, to protect their experiment, Oxitec has placed the boxes on private properties the locations of which have not been released in the media. The step has been taken pre-emptively to check vandalism by grumpy locals.

This is the new age of science, innovations are being made daily that would blow your average joe’s mind away. Science is our savior, embrace it. The future is ours if we have the sagacity to grasp it.