The buzzing of mosquitoes may be annoying, but what would you do if the government itself wants it to get stronger? California in the United States may just be on the verge of seeing millions of insects taking flight in the air as Google has sought permission of federal regulators to release as many as 32 million mosquitoes in the state to shrink .
These 32 million mosquitoes will be engineered to target diseases carried by them. According to , the insects would be released in only a few zones that have witnessed disease transmission at a higher rate.
And it won’t be done at one go. Google plans to release those engineered insects over a period of two years to monitor results and then adjust their strategies based on their observations. The two states that are targeted for the release of 32 million mosquitoes are California and Florida that have a history of mosquito activity.
How does it work?
According to the report, the 32 million mosquitoes have been treated to make them unable to carry diseases and thus, reducing their transmission and reproduction rates and interrupting their transmission cycles.
The goal eventually is to decline their population that carry harmful pathogens.
As ambitious as it may sound, Google is first supposed to have federal authorities’ permission to release them at targeted locations in California and Florida. For the approval, the federal authorities
Google must first obtain clearance from federal authorities before any releases begin. Before granting Google approval to release the insects, the regulators will first examine safety records, environmental assessments and monitoring protocols to determine whether the program’s disease-control benefits to public outweighs any risks to ecosystems.
If approved, Google would release mosquitoes and collect data from its impact for the next two years.
As this is planned, an experimental study has said that can learn to associate the smell of the world’s most common insect repellent with a tasty meal and after training can even prefer to bite people who have been sprayed with it. The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
As part of the experiment, the mosquitoes were repeatedly exposed to the smell of a famous repellant, which the seemed to get used to after a while. This study shows “that it’s not the chemistry of the molecule itself that is toxic” to the mosquito, instead they are repelled by how they “interpret this chemical information,” lead study author Claudio Lazzari told AFP.
(With agency inputs)
