Why Is Anything Mosquitoes?

[00:00] So, with Coalson out of the mix, I thought we might be able to answer a lot of questions
[00:06] faster with the three of us.
[00:10] You know, small teams can work quickly.
[00:13] And the first one, Jason, if you don't mind, I got the one I've been thinking about today.
[00:19] I love it.
[00:20] Let's hear it.
[00:21] Let's hear it.
[00:22] All right.
[00:34] All right.
[00:35] Are we doing under Googles?
[00:36] That was the play.
[00:37] I'm super excited.
[00:39] You said we signed up for it.
[00:43] In the end, it's going to be better and more true than Googles can give you.
[00:48] So, you know, for years and years and years, you know, I've heard of all these diseases
[00:58] that get spread by mosquitoes and there's lots of other negative things that come out of that
[01:05] besides all the different viruses, malaria, Zika virus, all sorts of stuff.
[01:14] And actually, this was brought to me by Jason, our friend, Maria from college.
[01:25] Her dog, they think she's got like roundworm or something in which they drink water outside
[01:30] or something that has the eggs in there and gets them sick.
[01:40] You know, most species that I can think of, they serve some purpose in the ecosystem that,
[01:51] you know, if they were to not be there, it would cause havoc.
[01:56] You know, everyone's got their place.
[02:00] I have not heard of one about mosquitoes and the question is, should we kill them all?
[02:12] Why are mosquitoes there?
[02:13] Why have we not done that yet?
[02:15] Why is anything mosquitoes?
[02:16] Yes.
[02:17] Yes.
[02:18] Yeah.
[02:19] I think that's the right way to phrase it.
[02:20] Why is anything mosquitoes?
[02:26] It's a good question.
[02:27] It's a good question.
[02:29] I mean, let's see, I'm sure they must serve some sort of purpose.
[02:38] There's certainly a lot of biomass for, they're a food source for a lot of birds and probably
[02:45] other insects and bats and all kinds of stuff, right?
[02:50] Like many insects are the bottom of the food chain, right?
[02:55] And if you eliminate the floor of the food chain, then it's going to have ripple effects
[03:00] all the way up the food chain, right?
[03:03] So that's probably the simplest answer, I would guess.
[03:08] Well, I think that this is like, you know, it's going to help with the, take your bootstraps
[03:14] or whatever and work yourself up the food chain.
[03:20] I think also the methods that we have for, because like cities, we do run around and spray
[03:28] to kill them.
[03:31] But the, I think the chemicals that we used to do it are pretty toxic.
[03:36] Like it wouldn't be a, you know, a light touch sort of thing to just kill off all
[03:46] the mosquitoes, right?
[03:47] I mean, you have to be very evasive, they're everywhere.
[03:54] And just the act of doing it would probably have poor consequences for health, even for
[04:00] humans, I would imagine.
[04:03] I think I had read something before about doing, doing some genetically engineered ones
[04:09] to release into nature, essentially, I think when they mated, they're, they were going
[04:16] to be like they couldn't produce children or the children couldn't produce or something.
[04:22] Right.
[04:23] Because the female offspring were unable to reproduce or whatever.
[04:28] And so the idea was that over a certain amount of time, you would slowly reduce the population
[04:36] of females that were able to carry on the mosquito line, basically.
[04:42] And so you'd reduce the population slowly over time.
[04:46] Right.
[04:47] Because that one male or whatever, any given male would be able to mate with only so many
[04:53] females or whatever.
[04:59] I don't know because that was an idea that was floated, and I think they were going to
[05:02] do an experiment like on an island or something like that, like a few years back and sort
[05:07] of see what happened to the ecosystem.
[05:10] It was like kind of the question that you're asking is what happens if we eliminate, you
[05:15] know, this thing from an ecosystem, like is it going to be a pure disaster?
[05:19] I don't know what the results of that are, or if it's still an ongoing sort of thing.
[05:25] One potential limitation was that it was only one, I mean, there are several types of mosquitoes,
[05:31] right?
[05:32] And so you'd have to, not that it would be that arduous, I guess, but you know, you'd
[05:37] have to do it for every type of mosquito species out there, I guess.
[05:41] Yeah.
[05:42] Because you'd start with the malaria-bearing ones first.
[05:45] And so you're going out into the wild capturing a bunch of these genetically engineering
[05:49] them and then releasing them back into the wild?
[05:52] Correct.
[05:53] Yeah, Jurassic Park style.
[05:54] No chemicals, baby.
[05:55] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[05:59] Yeah.
[06:00] And the idea was right, that it was chemical-free and would do it like sort of slowly, it wouldn't
[06:06] be an en masse, like elimination of entire species would be like slowly over many seasons
[06:14] or years or whatever.
[06:17] But again, I don't know what happened with that example.
[06:20] If you start that though, does it just end with all mosquitoes dead or, I guess, just
[06:29] unable to reproduce?
[06:30] Well, so no, I don't think so because I think that the male progeny also could reproduce
[06:41] or something like that.
[06:43] So it wasn't like basically creating the next generation completely infertile or whatever.
[06:50] So it's just creating population pressures on them by artificially shrinking the female
[07:01] portion of the population, right?
[07:05] Right.
[07:06] So the dating got a lot harder real fast, didn't it?
[07:10] Yeah, probably.
[07:11] I don't know.
[07:12] You envision some Jurassic Park-like mutation that comes down the road where they like
[07:18] only, some subset only have female babies or something.
[07:22] I don't know.
[07:23] Yeah.
[07:24] Or the male would start to produce eggs and eggs are no problem.
[07:29] Yeah, exactly.
[07:31] So to get back to your original question, what purpose mosquitoes might serve.
[07:34] So from the malarial parasite perspective, they serve a purpose for them.
[07:42] They spread those guys around, right?
[07:44] True.
[07:45] So it's an advantage for them.
[07:47] And then this is going to sound somewhat morbid, but I mean, there are arguments that limitations
[07:56] in the size and breeding capacity of other large animals or any other species, like there's
[08:05] checks and balances, right?
[08:07] And so the ability to spread diseases in some ways is a balance on the system.
[08:16] You know, the best way that we think about it or whatever, but I wonder, I don't know
[08:21] if this is true, but I wonder if that's part of the quote unquote purpose that they are
[08:26] serving in the ecosystem.
[08:28] Yeah.
[08:29] I mean, we'd be more comfortable talking about Darwinian pressures on other species rather
[08:32] than our own, but basically the same thing still holds true, right?
[08:35] Right.
[08:36] Exactly.
[08:37] I mean, people have definitely advocated at times for just getting rid of mosquitoes
[08:40] all together.
[08:42] I think that probably what you get, like you said, is probably just a lot of people don't
[08:49] want to, and that invasively interfere with the ecosystem because you just, you don't
[08:54] know.
[08:55] Mm-hmm.
[08:56] Mm-hmm.
[08:57] I wonder if they also like in sort of whatever, taking blood meals from one person to another
[09:08] or animal, you know, because it's not just people that get bitten by mosquitoes, right?
[09:11] Right.
[09:12] Like if there's some advantage to like, would that somehow have an impact on genetic diversity
[09:24] somehow?
[09:25] Like maybe, obviously not directly on gaming, but you can imagine like some sort of epigenetic
[09:32] changes or something like that, and that, you know, the idea is that introduction of genetic
[09:38] diversity basically just broadens the possibilities of speciation, right?
[09:44] Mm-hmm.
[09:45] To respond to the environment, and that overall is a good thing, is the idea.
[09:52] But I don't know if that's true or not.
[09:56] Well, damn it, I looked it up, and they have some redeeming qualities.
[10:03] So one of the first things that came up, though, Jason, you mentioned, is biomass.
[10:07] And I guess that they do serve, at least like the larva, serve as food for fish and
[10:17] birds.
[10:18] Okay.
[10:20] Yep.
[10:21] So, I'm sorry, as larva, they serve as food for fish.
[10:30] And then as adults, they are eaten by birds, bats, and frogs.
[10:37] And then the other thing, too, is apparently they're pollinators, which plants, I did
[10:41] not realize that, but plants probably appreciate that.
[10:47] So there's apparently a lot of different species, 3,500 different species, and only 400 of them
[10:55] can transmit diseases like malaria and West Nile virus.
[11:00] So most of them don't feed on humans at all.
[11:05] So they are working on some CRISPR research to essentially make them incapable of carrying
[11:13] disease.
[11:14] So instead of eradicating them as a species, which, you know, may carry too many unknowns
[11:20] for most biologists without a pretty strong god complex, if you could just take away the
[11:26] parts that, you know, allow them to carry malaria around, that would be, that would make
[11:33] everyone probably pretty happy.
[11:34] Yeah, apparently the men pollinate, they drink nectar, and I'm sure lots of people know only
[11:45] the females bite.
[11:49] Because they're actually, they're using, I believe that this is part of the reproduction
[11:54] process.
[11:55] I think they're using that as food for their offspring.
[12:01] So we're part of some sort of mosquito sex game, is that right?
[12:04] That's right.
[12:05] That's right.
[12:06] It's not gross.
[12:07] I didn't ask for that.
[12:09] I know.
[12:10] I didn't consent, either, that's...
[12:13] Nope.
[12:14] Yeah, so in this, so there was a study published in 2015, where they mutated three different
[12:21] genes in the mosquito that carries malaria in sub-Saharan Africa.
[12:30] And the idea was, right, that the females, if they inherited two copies of the gene, two
[12:37] of these genes would be infertile.
[12:42] And where to go?
[12:43] In cage experiments, they, the team released 600 mosquitoes, half of them carrying the
[12:53] normal and half carrying the infertility gene, genes, I guess.
[12:58] They're four generations, 75% of the mosquitoes harbor the infertility mutations, which was
[13:04] in line with the theoretical predictions.
[13:09] But this doesn't get to the idea of doing it in an ecosystem, and people predict that
[13:14] there would be a bunch of other things that you can't predict.
[13:18] Yeah.
[13:19] And, yeah, I mean, it would just be a lot of work with that many species.
[13:25] You're going to have to potentially go into each one.
[13:33] Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
[13:35] All right, but they do do other things, other than just make us itch.
[13:43] I think I was in good company when I was starting to search for this.
[13:49] One of the, you know, sort of recommended searches is, why did mosquitoes exist?
[13:55] So I wasn't the first, clearly.
[14:07] Thanks guys.
[14:11] All right.