I'm not sure what's going on with mosquitos lately, but they definitely seem to be having a moment in the news.
So apparently, with all this effort to kill mosquitos, scientists are fighting back by opting to, um, release them into the wild?
From Vox:
It sounds like something out of a nightmare: a giant drone flying through the sky and dropping containers full of live, buzzing mosquitoes, one of the world's most hated insects.
But in Hawaii, this scenario is very much real. A remotely operated aircraft, about 8 feet long, is flying over remote forests in Maui and releasing cup-shaped capsules full of mosquitoes.
Me whenever I read that a bunch of scientists want to "drop containers full of live, buzzing mosquitoes" onto the Hawaiian paradise:
But it's supposedly for a good cause...
For the state's avian species — its iconic forest birds, significant, too, to Indigenous Hawaiian culture — the main force of extinction is malaria, a mosquito-borne disease. ...
Saving these birds is quite literally a race against the clock. That's where the drone comes in.
Evidently the mosquitos being released are "all males, which don't bite;" they have been "reared in a lab" and "contain a strain of bacteria called wolbachia that interferes with reproduction."
When the males dumped from the drones mate with females in the area, "their eggs fail to hatch." It's a long-term plan, and one that is apparently cost-free:
The idea is to continually release these special males into honeycreeper habitat where malaria is spreading as a way to erode the population of biting mosquitoes — and thus suppress the spread of disease. ... Mosquitoes are not native, so local ecosystems and species don't rely on them.
Here's footage of the skeeter-dropping program in action:
The plan for now is to "regularly — and indefinitely — release the mosquitoes into forests with some of the most endangered birds." Since the project started last November, they've released 40 million of the little buggers.
I guess we'll see what happens!
P.S. Now check out our latest video 👇
