*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.
Your right it's a sister of Google not a Google project, maybe a title change to "Alphabet" instead of "Google". Especially since I clicked it thinking it had something to do with code. :P
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.
Yes, it may be possible for the mosquito to fight back.
The bacteria isn't mentioned in the video, but I believe it could be Wolbachia, which is already pervalent in the insect world. According to this FAQ [1], it already infects 60% of the insect world, so it appears that developing an immunity to it might be pretty hard:
8. Do other animals carry Wolbachia?
Wolbachia is common among arthropods (including insects, spiders and other small animals with no backbone). Up to 60% of insect species naturally carry Wolbachia, including butterflies, dragonflies, moths and some mosquito species, but not the primary species of mosquito involved in the transmission of dengue.
Wolbachia is also found in certain types of roundworms – known as nematodes – but this is very different to the insect Wolbachia that we work with. Wolbachia is not found in any larger animals such as mammals, reptiles, birds and fish.
What are the effects of Wolbachia on other insects? Is there a risk that other insects get eliminated by eating mosquitos carrying Wolbachia? It may be safe for humans and larger mammals, but how about smaller animals ansd insects?
The Wolbachia bacteria is a parasite, but it spreads by infecting the reproductive organs of insects. I don't believe it can be spread by eating an insect infected with Wolbachia, unlike other kinds of parasites.
The period with many less mosquitoes can still have a dramatic impact on future disease transmission. During the limited population period, the number of reservoir hosts also decreases dramatically (they either get over the illness or die). So later when the mosquito population rebounds, there is much less virus for them to spread.
For the diseases mentioned at the link there are animal hosts (other primates) so it won't be as effective, but for something like malaria where humans are the primary reservoir species, the effect can be very large.
It can also be effective in lowering the rates of transmission in urban areas.
The laser is very weak, it can't even blast through the exoskeleton, it just destroys their wings. (it is a cheap laser like those used in blu-rays...and it needs to use a minimum of energy)
Also, its sensors are smart...it can tell the difference between male and female mosquitos by beats per second of their wings. So that shouldn't be a problem.
Correction: This story used out of date information to claim that the technology had been licensed out. It has not been licensed to date. As well, it formerly stated that the U.S. Commerce Department paid for the company to showcase the technology in Germany. It just invited the company. We regret the errors.
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.
This is all explained in the video. The process has nothing to do with genetics; the good bugs don't bite because they're all male (the females are weeded out by the scientists), and male mosquitoes never bite. And they can't breed because of a bacteria related to healthy egg development. The good bugs still mate (with bad bugs, since there are no good female bugs), they still fertilize the eggs, but the eggs don't work.
The bacteria being used is probably Wolbachia. Singapore is one place where a trial of such Wolbachia treated male mosquitoes will take place to see how well it works. You can find out more details about the technology and the Singapore trials via this link [1]
That explains most of it -- the not biting, the displacement effect. Still, infertility is strongly selected against. Unless the introduced mosquitoes completely displace existing males in the mating pool, or the bacteria are transmitted between mosquitoes, it sounds like a pretty short term fix. With males living only 10 days, wouldn't the population bounce back pretty quickly?
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.
It would result in a lot of "childless mosquito marriages". Do this each year for a few breeding seasons and the population will die out. Run the math, it happens surprisingly quickly.
Looks like they mate with females, which still lay eggs, but the won't hatch. So less bad bugs mate and produce offspring. Needs large numbers of good bugs though.
They're only 'good' because they're sterile, and capable of sabotaging mosquito reproduction. If they weren't sterile and "only produce good male mosquitos again", the population would not decrease, they would just be releasing regular male mosquitos.
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.
Good try, but no, because my personal data can help them earn money (through advertising or other means), which Alphabet can use for funding their research in other areas.
I believe that is the goal. I'm all on board. I've heard about proposals like this for years and years. I'm thrilled someone is actually working to make this theory reality.
It'd be sort of like removing all of the kelp from the worlds oceans. It'd have ripple effects on other species that we wouldn't want to negatively affect.
This has been pretty extensively studied. There's always the possibility the science is wrong, but the consensus is there will be very small or no ecological impact[1]. It's certainly nothing like removing all the kelp from the oceans. Meanwhile roughly a million people die every year from mosquito-borne diseases and three quarters of a billion people get sick[2].
People have studied this. While you have to take these theoretical "what if" studies with a grain of salt, some believe that eradicating mosquitos would not affect ecology in a major way:
I'm now at negative points for bringing up a point that is validated by quoted experts in your cited source. (Which btw, uses a lot of "cover my ass" wording when talking about wiping out a species found all over the globe)
I've gotten malaria on a trip to west Africa, I've had to get yellow fever vaccines, i grew up in areas with west nile, etc I understand the impact it has on humans. However, there is more to the mosquito than the little insect flying around biting us. Their eggs and larvae play a huge role in the ecosystems they inhabit.
> I'm now at negative points for bringing up a point that is validated by quoted experts in your cited source.
I think it's hard to justify drawing an equivalence between exterminating mosquitoes, which scientists have studied and broadly believe to be safe, and removing most of the plant matter from the oceans. I would not have downvoted you, but it's not hard to understand how you ended up there.
I thought the same thing. Then I read that there are several thousand different species of mosquito, and only about 6 of them bite humans. We are not eradicating the mosquito, rather a very specific sub population; Aedes aegypti.
They are in fact the deadliest animal on the planet and unequivocally deserve complete eradication.
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.
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?
Not an expert, but I think an important part of this is only releasing male mosquitoes, and separating them at scale is generally considered to be difficult (there have been other successful uses of SIT but always with different species).
From their FAQ it sounds like they have made progress on this front:
> What has Debug accomplished so far?
> We've developed methods for automated mosquito-rearing, and we know that we can separate males from females with high precision, and we’re continuing development of these technologies at larger scale in our lab.
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.
So many potential unexpected consequences. Most attempts at killing off a pest have resulted in all kinds of negative shifts in the environment that end up being worse, just look at the Great Leap Forward in China. There are examples worldwide of this. Ecology is just too networked and interdependent to be able to easily engineer.
This always reminds me of the Star Trek Voyager episode "Year Of Hell"
Guy runs around with a ship that can destroy objects through all of time. Causing all of history to be rewritten. Trying to get his wife back after his home planet was destroyed. Manages to restore everything but his wife and goes mad trying to get that to happen.
There have been a lot of studies on this, and apparently it is safe to eradicate these particular mosquitoes (and given how many people are sick each years because of them, it doesn't feel like it could be worse than not eradicating them).
In any case, it's not really comparable to idiots killing birds during the GLF, since it was a completely stupid policy based on no science at all.
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?
Whatever caused the Zika outbreak in Brazil has nothing to do with Oxitec. As this post shows, Oxitec released their mosquitoes years before the Zika epidemic in Brazil and the release was done hundreds of miles away [1]
*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.
Your right it's a sister of Google not a Google project, maybe a title change to "Alphabet" instead of "Google". Especially since I clicked it thinking it had something to do with code. :P
They do present it quite ostensibly as a programming project tho i.e: the steps mentioned here http://debugproject.com/how/
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.
Yes, it may be possible for the mosquito to fight back.
The bacteria isn't mentioned in the video, but I believe it could be Wolbachia, which is already pervalent in the insect world. According to this FAQ [1], it already infects 60% of the insect world, so it appears that developing an immunity to it might be pretty hard:
8. Do other animals carry Wolbachia?
Wolbachia is common among arthropods (including insects, spiders and other small animals with no backbone). Up to 60% of insect species naturally carry Wolbachia, including butterflies, dragonflies, moths and some mosquito species, but not the primary species of mosquito involved in the transmission of dengue.
Wolbachia is also found in certain types of roundworms – known as nematodes – but this is very different to the insect Wolbachia that we work with. Wolbachia is not found in any larger animals such as mammals, reptiles, birds and fish.
- [1] [ http://www.eliminatedengue.com/faqs/index/type/wolbachia ]
The website notes that it indeed is the Wolbachia bacteria.
What are the effects of Wolbachia on other insects? Is there a risk that other insects get eliminated by eating mosquitos carrying Wolbachia? It may be safe for humans and larger mammals, but how about smaller animals ansd insects?
The Wolbachia bacteria is a parasite, but it spreads by infecting the reproductive organs of insects. I don't believe it can be spread by eating an insect infected with Wolbachia, unlike other kinds of parasites.
The period with many less mosquitoes can still have a dramatic impact on future disease transmission. During the limited population period, the number of reservoir hosts also decreases dramatically (they either get over the illness or die). So later when the mosquito population rebounds, there is much less virus for them to spread.
For the diseases mentioned at the link there are animal hosts (other primates) so it won't be as effective, but for something like malaria where humans are the primary reservoir species, the effect can be very large.
It can also be effective in lowering the rates of transmission in urban areas.
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.
(semi-serious question) What happens when the sucker lands on your face and gets detected?
The laser is very weak, it can't even blast through the exoskeleton, it just destroys their wings. (it is a cheap laser like those used in blu-rays...and it needs to use a minimum of energy)
Also, its sensors are smart...it can tell the difference between male and female mosquitos by beats per second of their wings. So that shouldn't be a problem.
But what impact does this laser have on the human cornea, or retina?
Reminds me of Nathan Myhrvold's mosquito laser :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnSKrzmpKGw
Well it does sort of exist: https://www.fastcoexist.com/3059127/what-happened-to-the-mos...
"Sort of" is right. I remember this being announced years ago, with press releases very much implying it was fully functional and proven.
Seems it is still a prototype.
The last paragraph says:
Correction: This story used out of date information to claim that the technology had been licensed out. It has not been licensed to date. As well, it formerly stated that the U.S. Commerce Department paid for the company to showcase the technology in Germany. It just invited the company. We regret the errors.
Intellectual Ventures? The patent troll? I have a feeling this project will not, in fact, have any impact on the mosquito population.
The problem is how to accurately classify mosquitoes, leaving out other insects that are required for the ecosystem to work.
This paper should give you a good start for phase I: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254023592_Real-time...
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.
This is all explained in the video. The process has nothing to do with genetics; the good bugs don't bite because they're all male (the females are weeded out by the scientists), and male mosquitoes never bite. And they can't breed because of a bacteria related to healthy egg development. The good bugs still mate (with bad bugs, since there are no good female bugs), they still fertilize the eggs, but the eggs don't work.
The bacteria being used is probably Wolbachia. Singapore is one place where a trial of such Wolbachia treated male mosquitoes will take place to see how well it works. You can find out more details about the technology and the Singapore trials via this link [1]
- [1] "Wolbachia-Aedes Mosquito Suppression Strategy" [ http://www.nea.gov.sg/public-health/environmental-public-hea... ]
That explains most of it -- the not biting, the displacement effect. Still, infertility is strongly selected against. Unless the introduced mosquitoes completely displace existing males in the mating pool, or the bacteria are transmitted between mosquitoes, it sounds like a pretty short term fix. With males living only 10 days, wouldn't the population bounce back pretty quickly?
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.
It would result in a lot of "childless mosquito marriages". Do this each year for a few breeding seasons and the population will die out. Run the math, it happens surprisingly quickly.
http://debugproject.com/how/
Looks like they mate with females, which still lay eggs, but the won't hatch. So less bad bugs mate and produce offspring. Needs large numbers of good bugs though.
Yeah it sounds like it would be better if the eggs still hatched but they should only produce good male mosquitos again.
They're only 'good' because they're sterile, and capable of sabotaging mosquito reproduction. If they weren't sterile and "only produce good male mosquitos again", the population would not decrease, they would just be releasing regular male mosquitos.
right, which means that eventually the entire population would be male and then die off
I was about to say that's impossible because meiosis produces equal number of "male" and "female" cells but... someone actually did it. https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2014/06/eradic...
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.
Because my personal data is very helpful with creating infertile mosquitoes.
Good try, but no, because my personal data can help them earn money (through advertising or other means), which Alphabet can use for funding their research in other areas.
Will we eventually see resistance to the bacteria the way that bacteria evolve to be resistant to antibiotics?
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
I believe that is the goal. I'm all on board. I've heard about proposals like this for years and years. I'm thrilled someone is actually working to make this theory reality.
It'd be sort of like removing all of the kelp from the worlds oceans. It'd have ripple effects on other species that we wouldn't want to negatively affect.
I am quite sure there are plenty of other blood-sucking insects around that will fill the ecological niche left by mosquitoes rather quickly.
This has been pretty extensively studied. There's always the possibility the science is wrong, but the consensus is there will be very small or no ecological impact[1]. It's certainly nothing like removing all the kelp from the oceans. Meanwhile roughly a million people die every year from mosquito-borne diseases and three quarters of a billion people get sick[2].
[1] http://debugproject.com/faqs/
[2] http://www.ebmedicine.net/topics.php?paction=showTopic&topic...
People have studied this. While you have to take these theoretical "what if" studies with a grain of salt, some believe that eradicating mosquitos would not affect ecology in a major way:
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html
I'm now at negative points for bringing up a point that is validated by quoted experts in your cited source. (Which btw, uses a lot of "cover my ass" wording when talking about wiping out a species found all over the globe)
I've gotten malaria on a trip to west Africa, I've had to get yellow fever vaccines, i grew up in areas with west nile, etc I understand the impact it has on humans. However, there is more to the mosquito than the little insect flying around biting us. Their eggs and larvae play a huge role in the ecosystems they inhabit.
> I'm now at negative points for bringing up a point that is validated by quoted experts in your cited source.
I think it's hard to justify drawing an equivalence between exterminating mosquitoes, which scientists have studied and broadly believe to be safe, and removing most of the plant matter from the oceans. I would not have downvoted you, but it's not hard to understand how you ended up there.
To be fair animals have gone extinct before without huge environmental impact so it's not so simple.
I thought the same thing. Then I read that there are several thousand different species of mosquito, and only about 6 of them bite humans. We are not eradicating the mosquito, rather a very specific sub population; Aedes aegypti.
They are in fact the deadliest animal on the planet and unequivocally deserve complete eradication.
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.
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
Not an expert, but I think an important part of this is only releasing male mosquitoes, and separating them at scale is generally considered to be difficult (there have been other successful uses of SIT but always with different species).
From their FAQ it sounds like they have made progress on this front:
> What has Debug accomplished so far?
> We've developed methods for automated mosquito-rearing, and we know that we can separate males from females with high precision, and we’re continuing development of these technologies at larger scale in our lab.
Similar (using crispr to change the mosquitoes' genome) video from Kurzgesagt, one of my favourite Youtube channels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnzcwTyr6cE
Wow, do people ever learn from history? I mean you just have to visit Australia to see what happens when you mess with nature...
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.
Develop this on GitHub. It will have huge public impact and will pick up steam fast!
Well, How will they know that all the bad bugs are gone?
Simple, when all the bugs are gone.
I'm sure this will end well..
What is your concern?
So many potential unexpected consequences. Most attempts at killing off a pest have resulted in all kinds of negative shifts in the environment that end up being worse, just look at the Great Leap Forward in China. There are examples worldwide of this. Ecology is just too networked and interdependent to be able to easily engineer.
This always reminds me of the Star Trek Voyager episode "Year Of Hell"
Guy runs around with a ship that can destroy objects through all of time. Causing all of history to be rewritten. Trying to get his wife back after his home planet was destroyed. Manages to restore everything but his wife and goes mad trying to get that to happen.
There have been a lot of studies on this, and apparently it is safe to eradicate these particular mosquitoes (and given how many people are sick each years because of them, it doesn't feel like it could be worse than not eradicating them).
In any case, it's not really comparable to idiots killing birds during the GLF, since it was a completely stupid policy based on no science at all.
Releasing a species to control another species; what could possibly go wrong?
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?
Whatever caused the Zika outbreak in Brazil has nothing to do with Oxitec. As this post shows, Oxitec released their mosquitoes years before the Zika epidemic in Brazil and the release was done hundreds of miles away [1]
- [1] "No, GM Mosquitoes Didn’t Start The Zika Outbreak." [ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/science-sushi/2016/01/31/g... ]
Thanks, very informative.
Weather patterns spring to mind. Warmth+Moisture = Increased population of mosquitoes.