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AndreInfante comments on How to win the World Food Prize - Less Wrong
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The issue is that crashing the mosquito population doesn't work if even a few of them survive to repopulate - the plan needs indefinite maintenance, and the mosquitoes will eventually evolve to avoid our lab-bred dud males.
I wonder if you could breed a version of the mosquito that's healthy but has an aversion to humans, make your genetic change dominant, and then release a bunch of THOSE mosquitoes. There'd be less of a fitness gap between the modified mosquitoes and the original species, so if we just kept dumping modified males every year for a decade or two, we might be able to completely drive the original human-seeking genes out of the ecosystem.
Or engineer mosquitos which are allergic or immune to the malaria parasite and release huge numbers of those.
Still, once you've done the expensive bit of engineering mosquito to produce sterile offspring breeding a lot of them is the cheap part and crashing the population, even temporarily goes a long way towards wiping out malaria in an area since it needs a certain critical mass to spread.
The proposal is not releasing dud males. The proposal is to use genetic drive, and the post included a link for people who have never heard of it.
Most mosquito populations are very specific in what hosts they parasitize, so removing humans from the list is not an option. Humans might be the only host!
Why do you think mosquitos that carry malaria didn't repopulate the US and Europe after they were first driven out?
They did.