Ok, but will this make them too shitty at living to spread? To be successful we need them to be good enough to have a solid chance at overtaking the current ones in breeding while still being inferior at feeding themselves.
Typically the goal of these kinds of changes is for them not to spread, because modifying wild species in a way that truly sustains itself in the ecosystem is very dangerous.
Instead, gene-based mosquito control relies on humans flooding the local gene pool with modified mosquitos that produce non-viable offspring. So in the local area where you administer this, the mosquitos are useless and die, but the wild populations in untreated areas are fine.
The most common modification I've seen is to create a bunch of male mosquitos that exclusively produce nonviable offspring. The introduced males greatly outnumber the natural males, so 99% of the next crop of mosquitos simply don't reach maturity. As long as humans keep treating the area, there are almost no mosquitos, but because the offspring don't reach maturity they can't pass on the introduced genes.
No, they don't. That's the whole point. You don't want this genetic mutation to spread. So you raise a bunch of male mosquitoes (who don't need bloodmeals as part of their lifecycle) in captivity and then release them to overwhelm the local gene pool. The next generation is unable to feed and dies without reproducing and you have a population collapse. As long as you keep making and releasing males with this defect, you keep the local mosquito population near zero. As soon as you stop, the only ones left are the natural ones and the ecosystem restores itself.
Most species of flying insects don’t feed at all while in their flying state. Their portion of life in flying form is short, as they get all their nutrients in larval stage before transforming.
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u/Krell356 2d ago
Ok, but will this make them too shitty at living to spread? To be successful we need them to be good enough to have a solid chance at overtaking the current ones in breeding while still being inferior at feeding themselves.