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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Mosquitoes aren't just blood thirsty. They also have a sweet tooth, relying on plant nectar to get the sugar they need to survive. Exploiting this weakness, scientists have developed an environmentally friendly eradication method. The new, inexpensive technique tricks these annoying pests into gorging themselves on insecticides laced with a concoction that mimics the sweet-smelling scents and aromas that they find irresistible. It could bolster efforts to suppress malaria, Zika and other mosquito-borne diseases worldwide.
The researchers are presenting their work today at the 254th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
"The blend of chemicals that we use to attract mosquitoes is so powerful that they will ignore natural plant odors and attractants in order to get to our formulation," says Agenor Mafra-Neto, Ph.D. "From a mosquito's point of view, it's like having an irresistible chocolate shop on every corner. The product is so seductive that they will feed on it almost exclusively, even when it contains lethal doses of insecticide."
Conventional chemical insecticides used to control mosquitoes are used as cover sprays, frequently dispersed over wide areas. But this blanket spray approach exposes people and animals to potentially harmful compounds and can kill bees and other beneficial insects. In addition, residues of these sprays can contaminate soils and streams, as well as promote increased pesticide resistance. To overcome these issues, Mafra-Neto of ISCA Technologies and colleagues at several universities sought to create a more targeted approach using an insecticide potion spiked with a blend of semiochemicals, or chemical signals, that mosquitoes can't resist.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Thursday August 24 2017, @05:51PM (1 child)
Females feed on nectar too. Basically nectar is the "keep me alive" food, while the females *also* require blood to make them fertile. So this should take out mosquitoes of all genders.
Out of curiosity though, even if this primarily took out the males, how would that be counterproductive? Males are after all *slightly* necessary to reproduction as well (at least among mosquitoes and most other two-gendered species). Of course to get much direct benefit you'd have to eliminate enough of the males that fertile females go a lot longer unbred, so it might be ineffective in the short term, but not actually counterproductive. And in the longer term you'd still be shrinking the size of the gene pool, rendering the species more vulnerable to other threats.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Sulla on Thursday August 24 2017, @06:54PM
If it primarily took out the males it would be interesting to see how long until offspring are not attracted to the poison. Could drastically change the way the mosquitoes go about their daily lives to have the 3% population that doesn't like sweet things be 100% of the parents.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4726748/ [nih.gov]
This link talks about a species where the males do feed on blood (occasionally) but it shortens their lives from a month to three days. Given swarms I imagine there is still time to make offspring. So natural selection will allow mosquitoes that like blood to double down on their blood lust and I imagine make the problem a whole lot worse to fix in the long-run. Areas that do not have any species where the males are willing to drink blood could die off before adaptation occurs though.
Can I get the rights to the speculative film on SyFy where full implementation leads to oversized males who drink blood being the only ones to survive (large enough mouth parts to actually feed on vertebrates) breeding with females who only drink blood causing a neverending cycle of gigantism and death.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam