Author: Stephen Johnson / Source: Big Think
- The method involves breeding thousands of male mosquitoes, infecting them with a particular kind of bacterium that renders female eggs unviable, and releasing them into the wild.
- It’s proven to be very effective in a test area in Southern California.
- The method could be used to combat mosquito populations in areas where the insects carry deadly diseases.
In 2017, Verily, a research organization run by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, began a counterintuitive project designed to kill off mosquitoes in Fresno, California.
The idea was to breed thousands of male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, infect them with a common bacterium called Wolbachia, load them into a van and release them into the wild. The lab-bred males, which don’t bite humans, would then mate with the females, which contract Wolbachia and lay eggs. But the eggs never hatch.
That’s because scientists at a company called MosquitoMate figured out in 2016 how to infect mosquitoes…
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