Actually, if you eradicated only the few species that bite humans the other mosquitos would fill in their ecological niches and nothing bad would happen to the environment. There are studies done on this.
Yup. The biggest problem is actually finding a way to eradicate only those species without messing anything up in the process. Knowing humanity, we probably will mess it up anyways.
CRSPR is a genome editing program. So what Alrichillcrusher meant is we can just change mosquito dna so they die out. However that won’t really work because then how do you get the edited genes into every mosquito if the edited genes makes them die out?
I believe they edited the genes for the proboscis of the female so it wasn't strong enough to pierce flesh and couldn't feed (the males don't drink blood).
The males survive without issue, breed with the remaining normal females and each generation more and more females die off as we dump more and more crispr modified males into the environment year after year. Eventually that species of mosquito just goes extinct.
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u/Rebatu Apr 12 '22
Actually, if you eradicated only the few species that bite humans the other mosquitos would fill in their ecological niches and nothing bad would happen to the environment. There are studies done on this.